Table 2 Historical perspective and development of beliefs related to
‘semen loss’
Authority
|
Period
|
Comments
|
| Agnivesa |
?1500 BC |
Charaka Samhita: An Indian Treatise on Medicine (see below) |
| Susruta |
? |
Susruta Samhita: An Indian Treatise on Surgery. The traditional
Ayurvedic knowledge of Agnivesa and Susruta was systematised and edited into
these two texts between 600 BC and AD 100
(samhita means ‘collection’). Semen is the most
concentrated, perfect and powerful bodily substance. Its preservation
guarantees health and longevity |
| Hippocrates |
?460–377 BC |
Diseases II: semen supplies the form to the human body |
| Aristotle |
384–322 BC |
‘Sperms are the excretion of our food, or to put it more clearly, as the
most perfect component of our food’ |
| Galen |
AD 130–201 |
Involuntary loss was termed ‘gonorrhoea’: ‘it robs the body
of its vital breath’; ‘losing sperm amounts to losing the vital
spirits’; exhaustion, weakness, dryness of the whole body, thinness,
eyes growing hollow, are the resulting symptoms |
| Celsus |
ca AD 50 |
‘It results in death due to consumption’ |
| Esquirol |
1772–1840 |
‘One of the most common cases of melancholia and dementia and also
commonly suicide’ |
| Tissot |
1728–1797 |
‘Losing one ounce of sperm is more debilitating than losing forty ounces
of blood’, in Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism. His
tenet was that debility, disease and death are the outcome of semen loss |
| Maudsley |
1835–1918 |
Semen loss, especially if it occurs through masturbation, results in serious
mental illness |
| Beard |
1839–1883 |
‘One of the commonest explanations of neurasthenia is wastage of sexual
energy, often in the form of nocturnal emissions (involuntary
emissions)’, in A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion |
| Freud |
1856–1939 |
‘Neurasthenia in males is acquired at puberty and becomes manifest in
the patient’s twenties. Its source is masturbation, the frequency of
which parallels that of male neurasthenia’. Freud opposes
Steckel’s view that semen loss has no pernicious effect on brain
functioning |
The Lancet
|
1840–1843
|
Editorial and articles by G. Dangerfield and W. H. Ranking: ‘On physical
disability, mental impairment and moral degeneration caused by seminal
loss’ ‘The symptoms, pathology, causes and treatment of
spermatorrhoea’ ‘Spermatorrhoea, or the involuntary discharge of
the seminal fluid’
|
|
