Precious bodily fluids.
Apr. 23rd, 2006 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
whathoI haven't had the pleasure of roaming loose in a second-hand bookshop with the intention of spending money that ought really to go on more sensible purposes for some time, but when this joyous occasion took place in days of yore, I always used to head straight for the medical section. There are few things I enjoy more than reading pre-WW2 home doctor books. They say the most astonishingly incorrect things. It probably wasn't half as funny at the time. But still.
I have about half a dozen. One is actually a medical journal and is full of wonderful adverts for stethoscopes and liver pills. One is bound in brown cloth with gilt bands. Far and away my favourite is my oldest text, the 72nd edition of, to give it its full title, 'The People's Common Sense Medical Advisor in Plain English, or Medicine Simplified' (1909), by the famous and slightly notorious R.V. Pierce MD.
Pierce practiced primarily in Buffalo through the latter half of the nineteenth century. He ran a couple of hospitals...was at one point elected to congress as a Republican...produced a number of noxious opium-based cures (Dr Pierce's Pleasant Pellets/Golden Discovery/Extract of Smartweed that he pimps in his book via dozens of testimonials and that he claims cure anything and everything from depression to strokes to piles)...and wrote at length and to my intense amusement on the subject of 'self-abuse' in all its hideous forms.
My favourite section, for some time, was the article on 'Obscene Literature'. Literature, Dr Pierce tells us, is a powerful agent either for good or evil.
'Obscene literature, or books written for the express purpose of exciting or intensifying sexual desires in the young, goads to an illicit gratification of the passions, and ruins the moral and physical nature.
It not unfrequently happens that a child is born with a vigorous, mental organism which promises a brilliant future, but manhood finds him incompetent, debilitated, and totally incapacitated for mental or manual labor. This may be the result of youthful indiscretion, ignorantly committed, but not unfrequently it is the effect of a pernicious literature which inflames the imagination, tramples upon reason, and describes to the youth a realm where the passions are the ruling deities.'
Who'd have thought?
The self-abuse stuff begins on the next page. I have a particular voice for reading it out loud. It's sort of posh and inflamed and probably quite turned-on. Here's an extract:
'Untold miseries arise from the pollution of the body. Self-pollution, or onanism, is one of the most prolific sources of evil, since it leads both to the degradation of body and mind...Statistics show that insanity is frequently caused by masturbation.
The health of the reproductive organs can only be maintained by leading a temperate life. The food should be nourishing but not stimulating. Lascivious thoughts should be banished from the mind, and a taste cultivated for that literature which is elevating in its nature, and the associations should be refining and enobling.'
It's the bit about stimulating food that most tickles me. I assume he means non-phallic vegetables. And the word lascivious. There was never a better word.
The other night I did find another page that returned to these jolly subjects, hidden among the chapter on spermatorrhea. The mini-titles in themselves are wonderfully entertaining. On a two page spread, we have, in bold, 'Insanity', 'Don't be Alarmed', 'Quackery Rampant', (heeee!) 'Treating the Wrong Disease', 'Moral Considerations' and 'Sensual Lust'.
Some extracts. On 'Insanity': 'This deplorable malady is not a very uncommon result of masturbation.' One is 'Not to be Alarmed' at occasional nocturnal ommissions. One is, after all, a hot-blooded male, and you can't be blamed for what happens in your sleep. 'The female sex are...often subjected to treatment for diseases which do not exist, the real trouble being nervous debility and other weaknesses that have resulted from the youthful pernicious practices common to both sexes.' MASTURBATION IS A HABIT WHICH TYRANNIZES THE MIND (I'm getting into character), PERVERTS THE IMAGINATION, AND FORCES UPON THE VICTIM VENEREAL DISEASES (it does what now?).
But 'Sensual Lust', I think, is the highlight of the entire book.
'The fancy creates an attractive partner, possessed of girlish beauty, a perfect type of goddess, blended with sexuality, and whom the subject worships with all the ardor of passion. Around this beau ideal all his affections are clustered; to her the purest of his blood is offered in sacrifice, and it is no wonder that female associates seem tame and unattractive when such imaginary and consummate divinity is courted. In the sensual delirium is conceived an elysium of carnal bliss, where half-nude nymphs [he's really lost it now] display their charms and invite to sensual enjoyments. Thus we see how this habit makes the spiritual faculties subservient to morbid passion, and by what means elevating influences are prostituted to vulgar and base-born creations.'
Then Dr Pierce went home for a very cold shower.
Seriously, if you ever come across a copy, buy the bally thing. It's the most entertaining book in the whole world. Even the index is a riot. I particular recommend the letter s:
Sea bathing
Sebaceous Matter
Secretion
Sedatives
Self-abuse
Seminal Weakness
Senses, The Special
Sensual Lust
Serum
Sexual Influences During Convalescence
Shoes, Misfitting
Love.
I have about half a dozen. One is actually a medical journal and is full of wonderful adverts for stethoscopes and liver pills. One is bound in brown cloth with gilt bands. Far and away my favourite is my oldest text, the 72nd edition of, to give it its full title, 'The People's Common Sense Medical Advisor in Plain English, or Medicine Simplified' (1909), by the famous and slightly notorious R.V. Pierce MD.
Pierce practiced primarily in Buffalo through the latter half of the nineteenth century. He ran a couple of hospitals...was at one point elected to congress as a Republican...produced a number of noxious opium-based cures (Dr Pierce's Pleasant Pellets/Golden Discovery/Extract of Smartweed that he pimps in his book via dozens of testimonials and that he claims cure anything and everything from depression to strokes to piles)...and wrote at length and to my intense amusement on the subject of 'self-abuse' in all its hideous forms.
My favourite section, for some time, was the article on 'Obscene Literature'. Literature, Dr Pierce tells us, is a powerful agent either for good or evil.
'Obscene literature, or books written for the express purpose of exciting or intensifying sexual desires in the young, goads to an illicit gratification of the passions, and ruins the moral and physical nature.
It not unfrequently happens that a child is born with a vigorous, mental organism which promises a brilliant future, but manhood finds him incompetent, debilitated, and totally incapacitated for mental or manual labor. This may be the result of youthful indiscretion, ignorantly committed, but not unfrequently it is the effect of a pernicious literature which inflames the imagination, tramples upon reason, and describes to the youth a realm where the passions are the ruling deities.'
Who'd have thought?
The self-abuse stuff begins on the next page. I have a particular voice for reading it out loud. It's sort of posh and inflamed and probably quite turned-on. Here's an extract:
'Untold miseries arise from the pollution of the body. Self-pollution, or onanism, is one of the most prolific sources of evil, since it leads both to the degradation of body and mind...Statistics show that insanity is frequently caused by masturbation.
The health of the reproductive organs can only be maintained by leading a temperate life. The food should be nourishing but not stimulating. Lascivious thoughts should be banished from the mind, and a taste cultivated for that literature which is elevating in its nature, and the associations should be refining and enobling.'
It's the bit about stimulating food that most tickles me. I assume he means non-phallic vegetables. And the word lascivious. There was never a better word.
The other night I did find another page that returned to these jolly subjects, hidden among the chapter on spermatorrhea. The mini-titles in themselves are wonderfully entertaining. On a two page spread, we have, in bold, 'Insanity', 'Don't be Alarmed', 'Quackery Rampant', (heeee!) 'Treating the Wrong Disease', 'Moral Considerations' and 'Sensual Lust'.
Some extracts. On 'Insanity': 'This deplorable malady is not a very uncommon result of masturbation.' One is 'Not to be Alarmed' at occasional nocturnal ommissions. One is, after all, a hot-blooded male, and you can't be blamed for what happens in your sleep. 'The female sex are...often subjected to treatment for diseases which do not exist, the real trouble being nervous debility and other weaknesses that have resulted from the youthful pernicious practices common to both sexes.' MASTURBATION IS A HABIT WHICH TYRANNIZES THE MIND (I'm getting into character), PERVERTS THE IMAGINATION, AND FORCES UPON THE VICTIM VENEREAL DISEASES (it does what now?).
But 'Sensual Lust', I think, is the highlight of the entire book.
'The fancy creates an attractive partner, possessed of girlish beauty, a perfect type of goddess, blended with sexuality, and whom the subject worships with all the ardor of passion. Around this beau ideal all his affections are clustered; to her the purest of his blood is offered in sacrifice, and it is no wonder that female associates seem tame and unattractive when such imaginary and consummate divinity is courted. In the sensual delirium is conceived an elysium of carnal bliss, where half-nude nymphs [he's really lost it now] display their charms and invite to sensual enjoyments. Thus we see how this habit makes the spiritual faculties subservient to morbid passion, and by what means elevating influences are prostituted to vulgar and base-born creations.'
Then Dr Pierce went home for a very cold shower.
Seriously, if you ever come across a copy, buy the bally thing. It's the most entertaining book in the whole world. Even the index is a riot. I particular recommend the letter s:
Sea bathing
Sebaceous Matter
Secretion
Sedatives
Self-abuse
Seminal Weakness
Senses, The Special
Sensual Lust
Serum
Sexual Influences During Convalescence
Shoes, Misfitting
Love.
