The moral and physical evilts likely to follow if practices intended to act as checks to the population be not strongly discouraged and condemned / by C.H.F. Routh.

  • Routh, C. H. F. (Charles Henry Felix), 1822-1909.
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The moral and physical evilts likely to follow if practices intended to act as checks to the population be not strongly discouraged and condemned / by C.H.F. Routh. 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.

    8/20
    The first side of the question, is that for those classes among whom you discountenance marriage, you shall provide by a system of license and sanitary inspection, clean prostitutes for their use. Hence, those odious con- tagious diseases acts, about which 1 shall not further speak to day. 2. You shall recommend artificial means, whereby ab initio you will prevent fructification ; in other words, advise sexual fraudulenci/, conjugal onanism; and the mischief is that such measures are advised under the garb of humanity, medical science, philosophy, and the like. I look upon the whole transaction as a base and mural crime, against which the whole body of the medical pro- fession should protest with abhorrence and disgust. The first mention we have of the crime occurs in Gen. xxxviii., 8, 9, 10 : “And Judah said unto Onan, go in unto thy brother’s wife and marry her, and raise up seed unto thy brother. And Onan knew that the seed should not be his ; and it came to pass when he went in unto his brother’s wife that he spilled it on the ground lest that he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the Lord, wherefore He slew him also.” And yet our French medical contemporaries, who see so much more of this system than we do, are very condemna- tory of this vile habit. Thus, Bourgeois, in his work on the Passions, says : “ Conjugal onanism is a real social pest. Every fraud is a choked germ rendered unproductive— an indirect infanticide ! ” Indeed, for the full develop- ment of this crime we must look mainly to France. Great and noble as that nation has been, and T know7 yet will be, it has tasted deeply of the pleasures of immo-