On spermatorrhoea : its pathology, results, and complications / by J.L. Milton.

  • Milton, J. L. (John Laws), 1820-1898.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On spermatorrhoea : its pathology, results, and complications / by J.L. Milton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    for it, is in all essentials the same person as the magistrate who m bygone days enforced his orders with the whip and halter, and the physician who refused the aid of his art to the patient with sloughing ulcer of the genitals. But there are men who are neither intolerant nor ill-informed, men for whose opinions on other questions I entertain a high respect, who conscientiously believe that spermatorrhoea exists only in imagination, that a patient who thinks he is suffering from it really labours under a delusion, and requires nothing more than moral means, particularly exhortations not to think about his complaint, and to read no books on the subject; that no sensible, properly minded person ever fancies he is affected in this way; and that the professed victims are essentially timid, lazy, sensual, egotistical people, who require to be sharply told that they should give up such sick fancies. Then why do iiot these gentlemen lay before the world a few cases successfully treated in this way? Strictly correct anecdotes and solitary instances of benefit, how- ever valuable they may be in themselves, do not meet the exigencies of the case. I, for one, should be very glad to avail myself of any more simple and speedy method of treatment than that laid down in the following pages, but I should like to see all this excellent advice reduced to a practical shape, and be satisfied of its superior therapeutic value, before adopting it, seeing that my experience is to the very contrary. For whatever may have been the good fortune of others, I have been unlucky enough to meet with such numbers of patients, many of thein energetic and resolute in a high degree, who had tried moral means with the result of complete failure, that I have long lost faith in them as usually practised, I do not contest their power to cure those cases of spermatorrhgea which would get well of themselves, but in more advanced forms of the affection, I believe them to be about as thoroughly useless as they wpuld be in any analogous form of disorder which the reader may choose to imagine. Unless these gentlemen will say point blank that their system of trusting to time and good advice is infallible, there must cer- tainly remain some cases which demand further measures. How these are to be dealt with we must, I presume, find out for our- selves, as no provision is made for such a contingency, which