peculiar on onanism. Nor
is there any specific onanistic psychosis. I am prepared to deny
that onanism ever produces any psychoses in those who are not
already predisposed." That such a view is now becoming widely
prevalent is illustrated by the cautious and temperate discussion
of masturbation in a recent work by a non-medical writer,
Geoffrey Mortimer (_Chapters on Human Love_, pp. 199-205).

The testimony of expert witnesses with regard to the influence of
masturbation in producing other forms of psychoses and neuroses is
becoming equally decisive; and here, also, the traditions of Tissot are
being slowly effaced. "I have not, in the whole of my practice," wrote
West, forty years ago, "out of a large experience among children and
women, seen convulsions, epilepsy, or idiocy _induced_ by masturbation in
any child of either sex. Neither have I seen any instance in which
hysteria, epilepsy, or insanity in women after puberty was _due_ to
masturbation, as its efficient cause."[332] Gowers speaks somewhat less
positively, but regards masturbation as not so much a cause of true
epilepsy as of atypical attacks, sometimes of a character intermediate
between the hysteroid and the epileptoid form; this relationship he has
frequently seen in boys.[333] Leyden, among the causes of diseases of the
spinal cord, does not include any form of sexual excess. "In moderation,"
Erb remarks, "masturbation is not more dangerous to the spinal cord than
natural coitus, and has no bad effects";[334] it makes no difference, Erb
considers, whether the orgasm is effected normally or in solitude. This is
also the opinion of Toulouse, of Fuerbringer, and of Curschmann, as at an
earlier period it was of Roubaud.

While these authorities are doubtless justified in refusing to ascribe to
masturbation any part in the production of psychic or nervous diseases, it
seems to me that they are going somewhat beyond their province when they
assert that masturbation has no more injurious effect than coitus. If
sexual coitus were a purely physiological phenomenon, this position would
be sound. But the sexual orgasm is normally bound up with a mass of
powerful emotions aroused by a person of the opposite sex. It is in the
joy caused by the play of these emotions, as well as in the discharge of
the sexual orgasm, that the satisfaction of coitus resides. In the absence
of the desired partner the orgasm, whatever relief it may give, must be