thousands of years, and it remained for an American to discover and
describe this vast territorial acquisition, and to annex it to the
domain of medicine, which, through its skill, could modify the influence
of the evil genius that there presided and spare humanity much of the
ills to which it had been subjected.

In this regard, Louis A. Sayre was to medicine what Columbus was to
geography. Neither Strabo nor Herodotus had anything to say regarding
what existed beyond the pillars of Hercules, and neither Hippocrates nor
Galen had anything in regard to this preputial Merlin, which in their
day, even, had its existence. Neither did Tissot nor Bienville, the two
pioneers in the field of our knowledge regarding onanism and
nymphomania, dream of the existence of this one cause of the diseases
to which they gave so much time and study. It is only some twenty years
since Louis A. Sayre read his paper, entitled "Partial Paralysis from
Reflex Irritation Caused by Congenital Phimosis and Adherent Prepuce,"
before the American Medical Association. This was the starting-point
from whence the profession entered into what had previously been a
veritable "Darkest Africa."

When we read that only some fifty years before the times of Columbus
Christian Europe had no lunatic asylum,--not that there was a lack of
lunatics or that the existence of lunacy was entirely ignored, but that
the then state of medicine and the general intelligence was not
emancipated from the idea of demoniacs,--and we are told that the
lunatics were in many instances hung, quartered and burned, hooted and
chased about the streets, or chained in gloomy dungeons; until, as
related by Lecky, a Spanish monk named Juan Gilaberto Joffe, filled with
compassion at the sight of the maniacs who were hooted by crowds through
the streets of Valencia, founded an asylum in that city. His movement in
this direction called the attention of the Church and people to this
class in a practical light, and from Spain a more enlightened idea in
regard to this class swept onward throughout Europe. As observed, it
seems strange to us of the present day that such ignorance in these
matters should, or could, have so long existed. It seems impossible for
us to conceive how these conditions of incoherent action and of mental
derangements could have existed and their causes have not been fully
appreciated; and yet we were not above, some twenty years ago only,
subjecting children to punis