The Spermatorrhoea Panic - sorry gentlemen!

Reading "How the penis made men weak" by Joanna Bourke was telling.  The penis could be an uncert­ain and erratic organ. In C19th Britain and America, masculine anx­ieties were provoked by the spread of a new and invidious though phantom disease Spermatorrhoea i.e the ex­­cessive, involutary disch­arge of sperm. It was believed to be caused by masturbation or self pollution, as well as indulgence in all things sexual. It was also a disease of civilisation, dis­prop­or­tionately plaguing urban prof­es­sionals. Although women might serve as temptresses, this disease was fundamentally the fault of men themselves.

It was the work of Swiss physician Dr Samuel-Auguste Tissot (1728–97) that transformed an old superstition into a full-blown health crisis. In 1758, his work Diseases Caused by Masturbation argued that the loss of one ounce of semen equalled the loss of 40 ounces of blood, and that masturbation was the most damaging way to lose liqueur séminale.

So as a vital fluid,  the seeping away of semen was thought to be extremely debilitating. Spermat­orrhoea led to nerves, constipation, flabbiness and impotence. It made men weepy and weak, just like women.

Cures for Spermatorrhoea could be as distressing as the ailment itself. Doctors recommended everything from leeches and laxatives to blistering of the penis, dilation of the anus and enclosing the penis in a urethral ring containing sharp teeth. On the gentler side, they proposed outdoor exercise, gymnastics and cold baths. And circumcision.

JRSM

Panics about excessive discharges of sperm occurred at the same time as fears of insufficient flows. Businessmen and medical pract­itioners keen to earn a “quick buck” saw a way to make mon­ey from penile performance anxieties and impotence. They market­ed products entitled Aromatic Lozenges of Steel or Elixir of Life. The assoc­iat­ion of Mormons with polygamy ecnouraged the labelling of aph­rodisiacs called Mormon Bishop Pills and Brigham Young Tablets. Ingenious devices were also promoted which promised to strengthen or lengthen penises.

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman also wrote about the Spermatorrhoea panic, noting that if anxious men had consulted their doctors, they would have receiv­ed treatments scarcely less fright­en­ing than the disease itself.  They might have found their penises en­cased in miniature iron maidens or have their testicles surgically removed. These symptoms and resp­on­s­es were part of the panic, which we now know to be a non-existent disease but which preoccupied surgeons and laymen for decades. 

Defined as the excessive discharge of sperm caused by excessive sexual activity/masturbation, the disease was understood to cause anxiety, nerves, lethargy, impotence and later, in­sanity and death. Tragic tales of ruined lives gave a flavour of the hysteria surrounding Spermat­orrhoea. What led doctors to imag­ine this disease, and patients to produce such symptoms? Why did both doctors and patients respond with such tough interventions? Why did Spermat­orrhoea have to be invented as a cultural phenomenon?

Anti masturbation device,

tied around the body with a leather strap

British Science Museum

It was one of the diseases which, although they had nothing to do with the actual diseases of the period (eg typhus fever of the new industrial city slums), were strictly Victorian, imag­ined into ex­istence to embody historically specific anxieties. The path­ologising of all forms of sexual excess (however defin­ed by Vict­orian writers), and its symbolic map­p­ing of the male body, spoke directly to distinctively Victorian constraints on pleasure. This was in contrast to the relative permissiveness of C18th and Regency models of upper-class sexuality.Along with other venereal diseases, it played a key role in the medicalisation of sexuality, especially as sexuality came under the auspices of scientific medicine, which introduced new diag­noses and new cures. 

Its moral and medical aspects were so closely inter­twined that it seems to have died out as different models of sex­uality emerged, though it was difficult to pinpoint the precise time and cause of death. As sexologists increasingly linked sex and nervous debility to psychological rather than organic causes, and protested against moralistic definitions of sexual behaviours, this disease lost its hold on both the med­ic­al world and the popular imagination. It came and went with C19th beliefs about male sexuality. 

In its medical and moral pathol­ogising of sexual experience, Spermatorrhoea was a prime example of Michel Foucault's scientia sexualis, with its authoritative scientific discourse, its case studies and its categories of deviance.

A man suffering from last stages of excessive self pollution

Wellcome Collection, 1845

But Spermatorrhoea also complicated the power structure that emerged in Foucauldian medical treatments, in which middle-class professionals objectified inferior Oth­ers, defined in terms of class and gender. Certainly Victorian cul­ture provided classic examples of this: the Contagious Diseases Acts authorised surgeons to forcibly treat prostitutes for venereal disease by painting their genitals with mercury. These laws clearly depended on a medico-moral thinking as a found­at­ion for doctors' professional author­ity. Spermatorrhoea was considered an ailment of middle-class men: they tended to postpone the legitimate sexual outlet of marriage until they were financ­ial­ly secure, they were prey to sexual panic because of class-specific constraints on erotic pleasure, and they could afford medical care. Nearly every victim was identified as a "gentleman".