aroused sexual emotions they seem to have passed unregarded. "We
naturally know nothing," Eulenburg remarks (_Sadismus und
Masochismus_, p. 72), "of the feelings of the priestess of
Artemis at the flagellation of Spartan youths; or what emotions
inspired the priestess of the Syrian goddess under similar
circumstances; or what the Roman Pontifex Maximus felt when he
castigated the exposed body of a negligent vestal (as described
by Plutarch) behind a curtain, and the 'plagosus Orbilius' only
practised on children."

It was at the Renaissance that cases of abnormal sexual pleasure
in flagellation began to be recorded. The earliest distinct
reference to a masochistic flagellant seems to have been made by
Pico della Mirandola, toward the end of the fifteenth century, in
his _Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem_, bk. iii,
ch. xxvii. Coelius Rhodiginus in 1516, again, narrated the case
of a man he knew who liked to be severely whipped, and found this
a stimulant to coitus. Otto Brunfels, in his _Onomasticon_
(1534), art. "Coitus," refers to another case of a man who could
not have intercourse with his wife until he had been whipped.
Then, a century later, in 1643, Meibomius wrote _De Usu Flagrorum
in re Venerea_, the earliest treatise on this subject, narrating
various cases. Numerous old cases of pleasure in flagellation and
urtication were brought together by Schurig in 1720 in his
_Spermatologia_, pp. 253-258.

The earliest definitely described medical case of sadistic
pleasure in the sight of active whipping which I have myself come
across belongs to the year 1672, and occurs in a letter in which
Nesterus seeks the opinion of Garmann. He knows intimately, he
states, a very learned man--whose name, for the honor he bears
him, he refrains from mentioning--who, whenever in a school or
elsewhere he sees a boy unbreeched and birched, and hears him
crying out, at once emits semen copiously without any erection,
but with great mental commotion. The same accident frequently
happens to him during sleep, accompanied by dreams of whipping.
Nesterus proceeds to mention that this "_laudatus vir_" was also
extremely sensitive to the odor of strawberries and other fruits,
which produced nausea. He was evidently a neurotic subject.
(L.C.F. Garmanni et Aliorum Virorum Claris