The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution
By: Dale M. Brumfield
Tags: American Grotesk, Medical, Masturbation, Human Sexuality, Medicine

The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution

An anti-masturbation pamphlet became an international bestseller — maybe for unintended reasons

1756 edition.

UNTIL THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, self-pleasuring was generally considered throughout Europe as a relatively inconsequential habit. Other than a wagging finger from the Catholic Church, doctors at the time saw nothing wrong with the vice and even argued that the retention of sperm by men could actually be physically unsafe and that women could avoid such distinctly female maladies as hysteria and madness if they pursued auto-erotic release. It was considered simply a natural part of human sexuality

But thanks to a 12-page pamphlet titled “Onania” that appeared one day in London around 1712, the act of self-pleasuring suddenly became Europe’s most depraved public health threat, one that produced various maladies that were destroying the bodies, minds, and souls of the nations’ youth. Almost overnight, masturbation became not just a moral transgression, but a debilitating physical and mental disorder that required treatment and of course, expensive cures.

But even a casual reading of one of the numerous subsequent editions reveals much more salacious reasons why the pamphlet became an international bestseller, with pirated editions making their way to America as early as 1724. A copy even turned up in Thomas Jefferson’s personal library at Monticello.

Origins

THIS Practice is so frequent, and so crying an Offence, especially among the MALE YOUTH of this Nation, that I have Reason to imagine, a great many offenders would never have been guilty of it, if they had been thoroughly acquainted with the Heinousness of the Crime, and the sad Consequences to the BODY as well as the SOUL, which may, and often do ensue upon it. This was the chief Motive that induc’d me to write on this subject.

- Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes, Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those, who have already injur’d themselves by this Abominable Practice. (1756 edition).

The earliest edition of “Onania,” published by a P. Varenne, starting circulating in London’s numerous coffee houses around 1712. Readers were astonished to learn from the pamphlet that “self-pollution” was responsible for a jaw-dropping range of mental and physical illnesses, including stomach disturbances, loss of appetite (or even insatiable hunger), vomiting, nausea, dropsy, weak breathing, coughing, hoarseness, paralysis, weakening of the genitals to the point of impotence, loss of libido, back pain, disorders of the eye and ear, total loss of bodily powers, paleness, pimples on the face and genitals, the decline of intellectual powers, loss of memory, attacks of rage, madness, idiocy, epilepsy, and fever. Left untreated, the pamphlet warned, the pernicious habit would undoubtedly lead to a lonely, agonizing death.

Hairy palms came much later.

But there originally was an ulterior motive for the pamphlet — while readers were rightfully appalled at the descriptions of the sicknesses produced by the revolting habit, the pamphlet also recommended that concerned parents could buy two miracle drugs from the publisher, compounded by a local apothecary, that would dampen their adolescent children’s (or even their own) throbbing biological urges. For sale was a “Strengthening Tincture” and a “Prolific Powder,” available for the somewhat outrageous price of 10 shillings a bottle, and 12 shillings a bag, respectively.

These cures could, according to the pamphlet, “prevent[ed] the falling of them down upon the glanduls [sic] in the urethera [sic] and parts contiguous, which cause Gonorrheas’ Gleetings, emissions of seed upon stool or in making water nocturnal pollutions, external redness outings of mucus or a moisture and the like in men … and in women on the glans in the vagina, causing the whites, bearing down, or relaxation of the womb, pain or weakness in the back and the like….”

“Onanie,” by Michael Zichy, 1911.

Unintended (or not) consequences

The popularity and influence of “Onania” were profound. By its tenth edition, it had sold over 15,000 copies before it was reprinted in 1724 for the American Puritans. Just over two decades after its initial publication, the new sin of onanism had wormed its way not just into society but into the eighteenth-century encyclopedias and contemporary medical vernacular.

The editors knew they had a hit, and improved the scandalous language of the later editions while downplaying the advertisements for tinctures, powders, and other cures. Soon, the volume had another motive — it was padded with lascivious, soft-core “testimonials” from young males and females describing feverishly pleasuring themselves — with, of course, the requisite hazards and undesirable results.

For example, a letter to the editor appearing in the preface of the 1756 edition (which had ballooned to 352 pages) described the after-hours behavior of schoolgirls, and the need for the headmasters and mistresses to peek nightly inside their bed chambers: “And I may add, would all Mistresses of schools also, (those of Boarding-Schools especially) have a watchful eye upon the conduct of their scholars, and pry more narrowly into their behaviour, in their secret retirements, the many sad consequences here spoken of, might be prevented, which to my own knowledge, several of them, through such Wantonness, have brought upon themselves …”

The book especially relished intimate stories from young ladies describing their adverse experiences resulting from self-pleasure. One, supposedly written by a “young female creature, but an old transgressor of the practice of that filthy pleasure which you have justly condemned in your Book of Onania,” described that “I began, sir, the folly at [a very young] age, was taught it by my Mother’s Chamber-Maid, who lay with me from that time until now, which is a full seven years, and so intimate were we in sin, that we took all opportunities in committing it, and invented all the ways we were capable of to heighten the titillation, and gratify our sinful lusts the more … we in short, shamefully pleasured one another, as each ourselves …”

The writer concluded to a most likely spellbound male reader in a mea culpa that “I hope, as now both myself and the maid have, on consulting your curious discourse of self-pollution, abandoned the practice, and resolved, through God’s grace, to commit it no more …”

And those readers eagerly responded — in a March 29, 1736 letter to the editor someone identified only as A. G. explained that “I lately, by accident, met with your author’s book, [titled] ONANIA, and read it with pleasure …”.

Another “humble servant,” signed only as W.C., begged that the publisher print a large-text edition, as he was “an elderly magistrate, and have concerned myself in the reformation of manners, for years.”

Another reader enthusiastically chimed in that “I received the favour of your little Book against Self-Pollution, and have given it, as it deserv’d, a second reading.”

Emery C. Abbey. The Sexual System and Its Derangements. Buffalo NY, 1875.

The author revealed

“Onania”’s original author remained a mystery until 2002 when Berkeley scholar Thomas Laqueur traced the text to a London huckster named John Marten. Marten was a self-educated physician and medical “cheapjack” who had been jailed for obscenity over an equally salacious book on venereal disease. After being released from prison at age 42, he tapped into eighteenth-century anxieties that the unbridled imaginations of pubescent children could become a damaging force to polite society, by creating “Onania.”

He had a hit on his hands. “Onania” eventually published 28 editions and was widely translated across Europe. The first U.S. edition emerged in Boston in 1724, where a resourceful printer named John Philips plagiarized the text and sold it, along with the tincture, from a shop in his own house.

The eighteenth edition, published in 1756 by H. Cook at Fleet Street, contained an appendix of outrageous stories of sexual aberrations supposedly resulting from the continuous act of self-pollution but most likely were included to “inflame the senses” of the reader. One writer asserted that the Pope had received a report of two nuns in an unnamed monastery whose sex changed as the result of excessive self-abuse. “The Cardinals commanded them to be expelled [from] the monastery, and that, at that time, they had changed their dress, and took upon them the employs of men.”

The book went to great lengths to warn that onanism was a slippery slope that led to further degeneracy and illness. A letter written in 1742 described a teenage boy so addicted to the practice that eventually “…as he could get time, as extravagantly, that of lying with lewd women, and drinking, whereby he got no less than three Claps and two Poxes by that time he was twenty-one.” The letter goes on to describe the “diverse other disorders and miseries” the young man suffered, including genital warts, his “spermatic vessels … twisted like ropes,” passing blood, and the worst, painful priapism that “wore him to a skeleton.”

“For about three months before he expired,” the letter concluded, “he stunk so intolerably, that nobody could stay a quarter of an hour in the room, without holding some strong or volatile aromatic to their nose.”

Emboldened, the book later expanded into decrying other “deviant” sexual practices, labeling people such as hermaphrodites as monsters, and not worthy of life on this earth. In one horrific account that occurred in 1461, the book described “a hermaphrodite, in a certain city in Scotland, that went for a Maid, yet got her Master’s Daughter, who lay in the same bed with her, with child.” She was “found capable as man as well as woman, convicted, and condemned before the Judges, and suffered death, by being put into the ground alive.”

Misdiagnosis

The pervasive and unrelenting need to impress onanism as a health threat sometimes led to mistaken diagnoses as late as 100 years after the book’s publication. In 1817, Connecticut physician Dr. William Tully, in an article titled “An Instance of Death from Onanism” that appeared in Transactions of the Physio-medical Society of New York, described a teenage boy who presented symptoms of emaciation, excessive thirst, a frequent need to urinate, and an increased heartbeat. While physicians today may have rightfully diagnosed acute type I diabetes, Tully instead diagnosed excessive masturbation and simply lectured the teen on his wicked habit. The boy later died.

The influence of the pamphlet and the accompanying fear of self-abuse continued to provoke hysteria well into the early twentieth century, producing some reminders of that frenzy still with us today. Doctor and fervent anti-masturbation advocate John Harvey Kellog (1853–1943), believed in 1894 that spicy foods were an inducement to self-abuse, so he, in turn, introduced Graham crackers and Corn Flakes cereal as bland, non-stimulating foods to reduce those youthful sex drives.

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Read more American Grotesk Historytelling at www.dalebrumfield.net.