num_pages: 84
description: This peculiar work was apparently first published in Latin in 1639 under the title Tractatus de usu Flagorum re Medica et Venereas. This is the first English translation made in 1898. The author discuses a number of medical conditions which appear to improve after flogging. With that term he includes a number of physical punishments such as whipping, hitting with a rod, spanking, and others alike. One of the arguments to explain it, is that the punishment improves the blood circulation of affected organs. Of particular interest is the claim made by the author, that flogging increases the "venery" of men (libido and sexual activity). He goes into great detail to prove his point drawing on writers such as Juvenal, Ovid, Apuleius and Catullus (to name a few). From the original translator's preface: "The author himself was a man of great reputation, an eminent physician, and an excellent philologer; and had he foreseen any ill effect from a treatise of this sort, he would hardly have risked his fame and practice by suffering it to be published. A bishop desired him to write it, and took care to spread it into as many hands as printing could; and it was attended with the improvements of two eminent physicians in the last edition (1570).... "That the use of strokes and stripes has an effect upon the languid organs after our author's manner of reasoning is no wonder at all to the learned, though the ignorant may be startled at the assertion. I crave leave to fortify our author's observations by a very common one among ourselves. It is the custom, when a stallion will not readily cover a mare, to beat him with staffs upon the back and so quicken the circulation of the blood, and stimulate the parts of generation to compliance with the purpose of nature. The effect is plain, and the argument will hold in proportion with the human species."
language: English
title: A Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery
titlecomplete: A Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery
publisher: Univ Pr of the Pacific