Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.

vertebra. You find no evidence, says Dr. Lolly, in this con- nection, of " your patient having ever received any sort of injury to the spine. He cannot account for it at all. If, how- ever, you ask him if he has had much sexual intercourse, he will say, if he is frank, yes; but mol-e probably he will not acknowledge to it immediately, but when you tax him directly with not having been satisfied with the caresses and charms of one siren, but that two or more claim him for their own, and that his animal pride would not allow him to stint, he will gen- erally acknowledge to the truth of the soft [hard ?] impeach- ment. If, on the other hand, he says, indignantly, that he never had connection with a woman in his life, and yet shows these symptoms and history, it is almost certain that he is the victim of that dread delusion, masturbation." The first thing to be done in these most important cases, is to stop the error of habit — the exciting cause. But this, from a long experience in this special practice, is found to be the most difficult part of our task. Rest, bodily, mental, and erotical, is the most important point in all the treatment. If your patient will not submit to rest, entire rest, absolute rest from all venery, and that for a long time, you had better take your leave without prescribing at all. I have known mercan- tile men, who were of business habits and sound sense in all other matters, also men of the professions, whose judgment is of the greatest value to their parishioners, clients, or patients, but who were such slaves to their venereal appetite and their own ideas of pleasure, that they would submit to any, ever so severe, plan of treatment that you like to propose, yet would not much abstain from such pleasures, or give up or even relax their ordinary but too close and ruinous mental application, or inordinate exercise. I remember once saying to a gentleman, who came on from Philadelphia for the purpose of putting himself under my care, but who had recently entered into a second marriage with a young, vigorous, and probably voluptuous wife, and as he was, and had long been, affected with precisely this state of " ex- hausted spine,'" not only showing this form of partial para-