Note 31 — Chapter VI · POLITICAL AGITATORS

The popular superstition about the dangers of masturbation seems to have become widespread in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. Havelock Ellis dates it from the appearance of a sensational book by an anonymous English doctor which was called Onania: or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and All Its Frightful Consequences in Both Sexes, Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice, etc. This is said to have passed through eighty editions and to have been translated into German. Tissot, a physician of Lausanne, contributed his Traité on the same subject in Latin in 1760. This appeared in French four years later, and subsequently in nearly all European languages. His watchword was that masturbation was a crime, “an act of suicide.” Voltaire popularized his viewpoint in the Dictionnaire philosophique, and the tradition became firmly set. See Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, I, 248–49. The cultural relativity of this attitude toward masturbation is brought out in ethnological reports.