Lectures on population, marriage and divorce : comprising an account of the causes and treatment of impotence and sterility, of the morbid and curative effects of marriage, and on the diseases produced by onanism / by Michael Ryan.

  • Ryan, Michael, 1800-1840.
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on population, marriage and divorce : comprising an account of the causes and treatment of impotence and sterility, of the morbid and curative effects of marriage, and on the diseases produced by onanism / by Michael Ryan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    maturity of age, or senescence, may be put down as the first causes of want of power of erection. Among such causes, we must reckon a frigid or apathetic constitution, a total insensibility to sexual desire, and this is said to be an aggravated or profound lym- phatic temperament. Descourtliz describes persons of this temperament in these words: The hair is white, fair, and thin, no beard, countenance pale, flesh soft and without hair, voice clear, sharp, and piercing: the eyes sorrowful and dull, the form round, the shoulders straight, perspiration acid, testicles small, withered, pendulous, and soft, the spermatic cords small, the scrotum flaccid, the glands of the testicles insensible, no capillary growth on the pubes, a moral apathy, pusillanimity and fear, on the least occasion, are symptoms of anaphrodisia or impotence, or sterility, and any one having the majority of these signs is incapable of copulation or generation. (Propositions sur PAna- phrosidie.) A habitude of chastity is another opponent to erection, such as with the ancient fathers of the desert, and in those who, by fasting and other forms of church discipline, extinguish those feelings, im- planted by nature, but, in their opinion, contrary to that purity which should distinguish those who have made vows of chastity. The organs of such