a review of Masturbation- The History of the Great Terror

… Only in the eighteenth century, with the anonymous publication of Onania, did masturbation become a medical, rather than a moral, failing. This work gave the practice symptoms, a progression, and a terrifying prognosis and then hawked a cure as did most quack medical pamphlets of the day. (The authors do a good job of proving the quackery of the pamphlet and of the writer’s science.) The popularity of Onania sparked ever-expanding editions and imitations; anti-masturbation ideas permeated society, and Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire and Rousseau further popularized the terrifying consequences of the act. Even the great doctors of the eighteenth century like Tissot began to see masturbation as causal in illness and proceeded to treat it as a real and deadly ailment. Trips to the brothel and/or early marriage became necessary to help boys avoid the terrifying consequences of masturbation that included gonorrhea, exhaustion, enervation, and death. Stengers and Van Neck provide fascinating accounts of the ways that early misreadings of the Bible provided anti-masturbatory moralists with evidence and the ways that faulty scientific methods served to confirm medical fears.

By the nineteenth century, masturbation supposedly robbed youth of their vital energies, debilitated the body, caused insanity, and eventually led to death. Because masturbation had such dreadful consequences, educators, doctors, and parents needed to terrify and sometimes torture children for their own good. Remedies included providing gruesome illustrations, lectures, and exhortations and proceeded from the psychological to the physical including tying children’s hands down at night, maintaining careful regimens of exercise, bland food, and exhaustion, and providing constant supervision. In cases where the child continued to masturbate, brutalities like clitoridectomy, penis piercing, and spiked penis sheaths became warranted. …