Volume 1 — CHAPTER VI Medical Guidance in Legislation

All thoughtful members of the medical profession will appreciate the power of education exercised by law, particularly on the rising generation. As students of human physiology, knowing the inseparable connection of mind and body, they can more fully understand how the laws of a country mould social customs, and recognise the gradual but widespread deterioration of social morality resulting from unjust laws.

In all legislation which endeavours to protect and improve national health the medical profession is necessarily consulted. The advice of experts is indispensable in framing measures which affect such important subjects as wholesome food-supply, the healthy housing of a people, the prevention and spread of epidemic diseases, etc. Indeed, so important is the connection of a sound body with a sound mind, and so linked together are all classes of society, that common-sense and rational foresight will more and more recognise that health regulations are a subject of national concern as well as of individual instruction, and the advice of the medical profession will be increasingly needed.

It is, however, equally certain that with the advance of intelligence, of education, and of political power amongst all members of a community, the great principle of Justice must become the foundation on which all legislation, which is to prove of permanent benefit to a nation, will rest. Expediency, regardless of justice, may sometimes seem to offer an easy solution of difficult practical problems, but it is a delusive seeming. The temporary adoption of such expedients, when contrary to the inexorable requirements of far-seeing or sympathetic justice, will always degrade, and in the end destroy, the society which persists in resting upon expediency instead of principle.

For this reason slavery and polygamy are always found to hinder the progress of any nation that is founded upon them. In our own country the unjust condonation of adultery, by law, in 1857, against the strenuous opposition of far-seeing statesmen, has educated more than one generation in a false and degrading idea of physiology.

In all sanitary legislation, where the authority of the medical profession is recognised by an appeal to any of its members for guidance in respect to practical regulations, the counsel given affects the honour of the whole profession, and it is vital to the authoritative status of the profession that the advice rendered shall be based upon a sound knowledge of the creative laws which govern our complex human nature. Superficial or one-sided statements, made on so momentous an occasion as an appeal by legislation to medicine, degrade the profession; and practical measures founded upon unsound knowledge may debase legislation and intensify the evils they are intended to diminish.

The most serious of all the subjects on which the advice of the medical profession is required concerns the legislative enactments or municipal regulations which affect the relations of the sexes.

The importance of these relations cannot be overrated. They deal with the very source of society. They may affect the soundness of both body and mind. If legislation fosters immoral customs which spread disease and death, then such legislation, corrupting a nation’s life, is treachery to human nature, and the false counsel that has been given is defiance of Divine law.

A great physiological fact which requires now to be faced is that promiscuous intercourse cannot be made physically healthy. The reasons for this have already been stated.[5] But no practical measures are sound which do not steadily repress this dangerous and debasing practice in men and women.

This great problem of sexual evil has never hitherto been studied from the two sides which Nature presents to us. But sound physiology requires that the parallel functions and equal attraction in the two halves of humanity be considered. A Christian nation must recognise that the purchase of the weaker by the stronger is a cruel and debasing trade which must be checked, and that the substitution of promiscuous intercourse for Christian marriage is a physical and moral degradation to each half of the human race.

When the facts are fully grasped—1st, that men are not made dependent upon women for the maintenance of individual health and vigour; 2nd, that women violate a law of nature when they fail to reverence their potential motherhood—the great principle which should guide sex legislation will be established.

In all practical measures required to check sex disorders in our midst, the co-operation of experienced men and women is essential.

Whether it be for the maintenance of good order in the streets, for purification of the slums, for reduction of brothels, for reform of marriage laws, or for the extirpation of venereal disease, no regulations will unite expediency with justice, which do not proceed from the united wisdom of earnest men and women.

There are encouraging signs in the present day that such a source of hopeful practical reform will become possible, and that men and women of large experience are rising into that reverential recognition of the Creative Power entrusted to the human race, which will enable them to consult together, and thus gain the wisdom necessary for practical action.

The awful aberrations of our sexual nature, which produce such profound social disorder and exercise such degrading influence on the relations of men and women, result from ignorance of physiological laws and the adaptation of human physical structure to the maintenance of those laws.

It is through the recognition of these facts by the medical profession, and their instruction of parents in the truths of physiology, that the most powerful impetus to human growth may now be given. The medical profession can prove, through its knowledge of the physical and mental structure of the human race, that the great Christian doctrine of one equal standard of morality for our race is true doctrine based upon our human constitution.

Our noble profession is summoned to a mighty warfare in the present deadly strife between good and evil. If as Christian physicians, believing in a beneficent Creative Power, and imbued with the spirit of the Master, they recognise the Divine unity manifested through the compound nature of all life, they will become the vanguard of that growing army of truth which seeks to know and obey Divine law.

APPENDIX I. (Page 24)

Human procreation possesses a double relation—viz., first, a relation to the race; and, second, a relation to the individual. In the former character, as the inevitable method of continuing the race, it is a great providential law whose mysteries we by no means comprehend, and which is placed quite beyond the control of the human will; but in the latter, the exercise of this great power of procreation possesses the distinctive mark of self-control, and as an individual act our power and responsibility are great. In this important subject of procreation, no one can speak with scientific precision and lay down absolute rules respecting its complete method of action. It has been wisely said by one of the most skilful and experienced French physicians:[6] ‘No opinions put forth reconcile all facts. We are obliged to confess that there is a mystery in this subject, that our most ingenious theories fail to enlighten.’

In considering this subject in its relation to the individual, the beneficent educational uses of parentage to the individual must be realized, and the irreparable loss that human society would sustain from the absence or serious diminution of the parental relation. Parentage is the most potent and persistent civilizer and educator of our race. There is no other influence that will compare with the deep-seated and unique power of parentage in breaking down the narrow, unsocial barrier of exclusive individual selfishness. Much has always been said and written about maternal love, but there is a very deep significance in the persistence with which the Hebrew Scriptures exalt the power, the supreme beneficence of fatherhood; and there is a profound reason why universal Christendom is taught to address, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’ It is a special lesson to men. The mother, by the inevitable facts of her nature, when that nature is not corrupted, is moulded into tenderness and providential watchfulness over the weak and helpless; her nature is a harmonious whole, and, as a beneficent general rule, all women are potential mothers. But Nature does not so inevitably educate men. It is only when his first-born child is laid in his arms that the man awakens fully to the wonder and infinite tenderness of paternity. The character of the childless woman does not suffer from the absence of that beneficent discipline and development which come from parentage as does the character of the man. It is very instructive to observe how unmarried or childless women replace by adoptions or by pets their unexercised natural affections.

Any failure to realize the Divine purpose in this joining together of cause and effect amongst the mass of mankind, any efforts which tend to diminish respect for the parental relation and destroy the perception of its essential sacredness, must be disastrous to the welfare of a nation.

The educational influence of parentage as a fundamental fact in human progress must be borne in mind with all the reverence which is due to it, when we seek to remedy the hideous perversions of natural sentiment, which we find in our unhuman slums. It is not by destroying parentage, but by teaching its responsibilities and by restoring its educational influence upon the adult, that we must hope for progress.

In seeking to bring into the freedom of humanity, not only the swarms of poor fellow-creatures sweltering in city slums, but all classes of human beings struggling in the slough of unrestrained lust, we must reverently study Nature’s laws as they are gradually discovered in relation to parentage, by which the Creator gradually develops even the lowest forms of mankind through parentage.

The fact established by Raciborsky, the famous German physician, in a former generation is that ‘the period when conception is most likely to take place is near the time of menstruation, either just before it or during a few days after the time.’ It is not asserted that conception in the human race is necessarily limited to this interval of time, for it is true that great stimulus of the organs produced at any period of the month may bring about a similar congestion or special aptitude for conception. But the periodic character of the woman’s constitution regulates the probability of conception to so great an extent that by this law higher and lower sentient beings are brought into harmony, and woman assumes her due place as the regulator of sexual intercourse. Throughout the animal world procreation is governed by the will of the female. Not violence, but gentleness, is shown by the male to the female. Her refusal or desire guides sexual intercourse amongst the lower animals. To raise the human race to this higher animal level from which it has fallen is a special task of advanced physiology, which can show the physical method and reason of this redemption.

Human marriage must be regarded as a life companionship, in which the satisfaction of physical desires forms a secondary, not a primary, part. When so entered upon, love will direct its relations for the good of the two joined together in this unique union. The man joins himself to the woman in loving companionship, and her constitution henceforward must determine the times of the special act of physical union.

The foregoing physiological law is a truth full of hope and promise of infinite progress, for nations have hitherto perished in large measure through the abuse and degradation of women. The regulation of sexual intercourse in the best interests of womanhood is the hitherto unrecognised truth of Christianity, towards which we are slowly groping. When it is fully accepted, a fresh spring of vigour will have been discovered for the human race.

APPENDIX II. (Page 32)

The following sound advice on sexual physiology from the Lancet should be widely known:

‘Young men in their conflict with temptation to sexual advice often suffer under the disadvantage of receiving but little help from those to whom they ought to look for it with confidence. Few parents have the knowledge and the wisdom to tell their sons the most important truths about the sexual passion just at the time when it is becoming developed in them, and the latter are therefore left an easy prey to their strange desires, and to those “lewd fellows of the baser sort” who are always at hand to corrupt innocent youth.

‘If it is true that to a very large extent parents are unmindful of one of their gravest responsibilities, it is no less true that the medical profession has often failed in its duty in connection with this subject. Medical writers and medical men generally are too often silent on this matter, and unfortunately, when the silence has been broken, it has not always been with words of truth and soberness. We are constantly hearing and saying that “knowledge is power,” yet we find that little effort is made to impart the knowledge which would largely aid in preserving the virtue of the young, and the most pernicious teaching of those who for the lowest of reasons propagate error is left unnoticed.

‘Knowledge alone will never make a people virtuous, but it is an invaluable aid to those who are striving to control their passions. Seeing, on all sides, the terrible physical, mental, and social havoc wrought by sexual vice, we feel that the medical profession should do its utmost to stem the evil, and, at any rate, should give utterance to the truth with no uncertain sound. What are the physiological facts that ought to be proclaimed by the medical profession? Mainly these. In the first place, that occasional involuntary emissions of semen during sleep, and often in association with libidinous dreams, are natural occurrences in unmarried continent men, and are neither the cause nor the consequence of disease. The emissions are most frequent between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five; they vary in frequency in different men, but are favoured by sedentary occupations and by lewd thoughts. The subjects of these emissions sometimes complain of various sensations of malaise, which they attribute to the depressing influence of these losses; but it is a striking fact that such symptoms are only met with in those who have an exaggerated or erroneous conception of the significance of the discharge, and that they quickly disappear when their real meaning and causation are understood. To regard such a physiological occurrence as a disease and name it “spermatorrhœa” is a very serious error.

‘The second fact we wish to insist upon is that sexual continence does not beget impotence, and that the all-prevailing cause of impotence is prolonged sexual excess. In support of the opposite conclusion appeal has been made to analogy. It has been pointed out that unused muscles and bones waste, and therefore, it is urged, it must be true that continence will lead to impotence. Such argument is utterly fallacious, as are most arguments from analogy. Facts in abundance prove the contrary. Common as is sexual vice, continence is not unknown among us, and the truth of our statement is not difficult to verify. The real argument from analogy is drawn from the breast. This gland is generally inactive for many years after puberty, and yet, whenever the call for its activity arrives, it is more or less perfectly responded to. As a matter of fact, impotence does not depend upon the testicle, but upon the spinal cord; the sexual act is a physiological nerve-storm, and not simply an act of secretion. Loss of sexual potency is due to some fault in the nerves of the parts, or more commonly in the centre, in the spinal cord, which presides over this function. It is often a solitary nervous phenomenon, and by itself is not of grave import.

‘The third physiological fact we ought to teach is that no function of the body is so influenced and controlled by the higher nerve-centres as the sexual. It is excited by lewd imaginings, loose talk, and sensuous scenes. It is set in motion by even accidental stimulus of any part of the nervous system affected by the sexual organism. Hence the difficulty of continence. On all sides are sights and sounds that may become the stimulus of sexual excitement. The other side of the picture is equally true. By the exercise of watchfulness and self-control the occasions of such excitement may be reduced to a minimum, and the passion may be subdued.

‘Medical men are sometimes asked to formulate rules of diet and exercise—hygienic rules—by which immorality is to be banished. The task is altogether impracticable. Vice is voluntary, and it is only by the exercise of a resolute self-will that virtue is maintained.

‘We cannot but believe that were these three very elementary but fundamental physiological truths properly presented and enforced upon young men very much misery would be avoided. Ignorance of them drives men into the clutches of ruthless charlatans, leaves them a prey to groundless fears, and often leads them into vicious habits from which they are unable to free themselves. To withhold such knowledge is in many cases to leave youths in ignorance of the one power by which they can successfully contend against the evil. We feel strongly the urgent importance of this matter, and hence we speak plainly, and hope that others, as they have opportunity, will do their best to help young men in their struggle against vice.’

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