Knowlton Biography, Chapter 40
Forty: Onanism Again
Great good may be done these patients by setting them right on all these points. It is of no use to look gravely, and tell them that their case is a very bad one. I make light of it, and laugh a load of melancholy out of them…I tell the young unmarried men—unless they are dying off with consumption or some other disease—to marry as soon as convenient; and I assure you, Mr. Editor, that I have known this advice to be followed in several instances, and always with success.
The success of Fruits of Philosophy opened the door for popular medical writers. Books about health and illness for the general public became more common as their publishing became less controversial. Mostly, this was a good thing—but some areas like sexuality were still surrounded by superstition and misinformation. Charles didn’t regret the new openness that allowed quacks to print bad advice about sex. The ability to debate the topic in print was a big improvement over the public ignorance that had made his own young life so painful. And Charles was a leading authority in the field, so he was in a position to set the record straight.
Onanism was still sensational, so it was one of the “diseases” that attracted a lot of popular medical attention. Charles had written more candidly about the topic with each edition of Fruits of Philosophy, arguing more and more openly that nocturnal emissions were not a serious illness and masturbation wasn’t even a problem. But after centuries of religious indoctrination, American culture was steeped in the idea that “self-abuse” was sinful and self-destructive. Guilt and fear were easy targets for quacks.
A pair of “Consulting Surgeons” named Perry, for example, published a book in 1841 called The Silent Friend: A Medical Work, on the disorders produced by the dangerous effects of onanism. Like Onania and Tissot’s Treatise, which had been published nearly a century earlier, The Silent Friend claimed that masturbation caused everything from impotence to poor eyesight. The Perry brothers gave case after case in titillating, graphic detail. Then, after frightening their readers for 150 pages, they offered their cure: Perry’s Cordial Balm of Syriacum.
Perry’s Balm was a patented recipe, specifically formulated to cure the “disease” of masturbation and spare victims from its “dreadful consequences.” Although the balm’s components are unknown, its name suggests the active ingredient. Origanum syriacum is the botanical name of the cooking herb oregano.
Other medicines advertised as cures for masturbation contained ingredients that were less common and potentially much more dangerous. Solomon’s Cordial Balm of Gilead used its biblical-sounding name to appeal to people frightened by sermons against licentiousness. Claiming to aid in the production of semen and “strengthen the genital muscles,” Samuel Solomon’s Cordial was offered as an antidote to “the debility arising from self-abuse.” It contained cardamom, brandy, and cantharide beetles. And if Solomon’s Cordial failed to cure them, desperate sufferers could always try William Acton’s concoction of “strychnine and phosphoric acid with either syrup of orange-peel or syrup of ginger.”
Unfortunately, mail-order patent medicine quacks weren’t the only source of misinformation and danger to the public. An 1842 issue of the Boston Medical & Surgical Journal contained a lead article titled “Seminal Weakness—Castration.” In it, a doctor from New Hampshire described the case of a twenty-two year old patient, whose health had been declining for six years. The young man, said the doctor, had been drugged “with all sorts of medicines, for all sorts of diseases, by all sorts of doctors.” Taking over the seemingly hopeless case, the doctor determined that the cause of the young man’s decline was wet dreams caused by masturbation. He recommended castration. The young patient “was so miserable, and life itself had become such a burden for him,” that he consented.
But it wasn’t just an occasional letter to the editor advocating extreme treatments that concerned Charles. In June, 1842, the editor of Boston Medical & Surgical Journal recommended an only slightly less drastic treatment for preventing nocturnal emissions, which a Boston doctor had recently tried on “a young man who was almost driven to insanity by their frequency and copiousness.” The patient had considered “being emasculated; but because he entertained an idea that strength and vigor of intellect depended upon the re-absorption and diffusion of the seminal fluid in the brain, he concluded to try some other scheme to save the organs.” His doctor, accordingly, didn’t castrate him, but only tied off the spermatic artery.
The June editorial was the last straw for Charles. “For good and sufficient reason my thoughts have been directed to the subject of nocturnal seminal emissions for more than twenty years,” he wrote to the Journal in July, 1842, “and your notice…of the operation of tying the spermatic artery for this infirmity…incites me to offer you some of my reflections and experience in relation to this disease.” Gonorrhoea Dormientium, Charles wrote, was not even really a disease. The misery surrounding it was caused by the patient’s belief that he was ill, that he had brought it on himself, and “that it would kill him to marry.” The most effective treatment, Charles suggested, was to remove these anxieties. “I never met with the disease in a married man,” Charles wrote. “I tell my patients…not to think or care anything about them,” he concluded, but if the wet dreams really bothered them, “they must marry.” And Charles wasn’t afraid to reveal the source of his insight. “If they seem to doubt,” he said, “I tell them to doubt not, for I speak from personal as well as from practical experience.”
Charles felt strongly enough about the misrepresentation of masturbation as a disease and the mistreatment of patients, even twenty years after his own experience, to expose his personal history. If this was shocking to some of the Journal’s subscribers, what came next was even worse. Gonorrhoea Dormientium was not caused by masturbation, Charles declared, because “masturbation is practised by thousands who are not subject to these emissions, and practised to a greater extent, too, than it ever has been by many who are subject to them.” And a young man, having been taught to fear the dreadful consequences, was usually so alarmed by his first wet dream that he “relinquishes at once and entirely the practice of onanism; but no cures—I presume to say not a single cure—were ever obtained in this way.” Finally, the surgical options the Journal recommended, Charles said, only worked because they emasculated the young patients, “unless, indeed, the loss of blood and the shock of the operation may produce a new state of things; and I have yet to learn, by my own experience that so severe a measure is ever necessary.”
Although some Journal readers were probably shocked by the frankness of Charles’s article, several wrote letters praising “the sensible remarks of Dr. Knowlton.” One physician who wasn’t as comfortable as Charles about putting his name on his letter, anonymously agreed with Charles that “much unnecessary suffering of body and terror of mind are the lot of many young men…especially when their alarms are encouraged by the physician into whose hands they fall.” Several doctors said they had recommended “marriage as a remedy.” The Journal’s editor did not comment on Knowlton’s criticism of his recommendations, but a couple of months later the Boston Medical & Surgical Journal gave its first and only notice of Fruits of Philosophy.
The editor began his review by expressing his surprise that, although the book had gone through four editions and had been “extensively circulated,” a copy had never reached the Journal. “Although written by a medical man,” the editor said, “who is certainly a bold, vigorous thinker, and who appears not to have the fear of the world’s frowns before his eyes, it seems particularly designed for the great public at large.” This was a feature of Fruits of Philosophy the editor did not appreciate as much as some of his readers.
Because he’d been “taken by surprise by this little book,” the editor said he was not prepared to comment on its “literary merits, physiological accuracy, or moral tendency.” The one opinion the editor of New England’s premiere medical journal would give on Knowlton’s book was, “We think, however, that the less that is known about it by the public at large, the better it will be for the morals of the community.” Perhaps the editor was retaliating for Knowlton’s challenge to the Journal’s authority in his article on Gonorrhoea Dormientium. Perhaps he was just that far behind the times. The editor was a physician named Jerome Van Crowninshield Smith—a few years later he would serve a single term as Boston’s only Mayor from the Know-Nothing Party. In any case, the conservative elitism of the editor’s perspective probably explains why Charles had never bothered to send the Journal a copy of Fruits of Philosophy.