_Case._――Mrs. P., in addition to unmistakable symptoms of spinal anæmia, with dorsal tenderness would, at the sudden closure of a door, complain of great pain in her abdomen, stomach and uterus. On several occasions she had had involuntary evacuation of fœces and urine during a thunderstorm. Her skin would be covered with cold sweat (hyperidrosis). Medicine had very little influence in this case; but electricity applied daily for three months――a mild current of Faradisation――effected a very satisfactory improvement. This was a case of sexual origin and a result of fifteen years’ sexual excess in her early life; after which she married well to enjoy the remainder of her life in wedlock under the care of a physician constantly.
The cervical region is not uncommonly affected and may be very tender, which may produce pain in the stomach and nausea, rejecting everything swallowed, at times. Sleep is nearly always deranged: sometimes sleeplessness, and again, in the same patient, profound coma of long duration is observed, and somnambulism is also likely to occur in such cases. Twitching of muscles, contraction of flexor tendons, hiccough, aphonia, vertigo, head-pain through the top, tinnitus aurium, disturbance of vision, asthenopia, and mental derangements, as the last stage of the disease, when the brain and entire nervous system are in a feeble condition: all follow, in rare occurrence, the sexual debauch, and are symptoms of the entailed conditions, viz., sexual neurosis, of which spermatorrhœa is only one of the numerous symptoms, yet perhaps the most attractive.
As these foregoing types or conditions advance, they become complicated and even change in essential features; but if not remedied, the result must be toward paralysis, insanity, tabes dorsalis, epilepsy and imbecility; all of which can best be studied as special diseases in numerous volumes on diseases of the nervous system.
_Cerebral Sexual Neurosis._――That form of neurosis, brought on by masturbation in adolescence and sexual excesses, does not exist independently of other portions of the nervous system, and only as the spinal cord becomes impaired by excessive sexual shocks and evolution of nerve-force, which is expended in orgasms during sexual excitement, does the brain become involved, and its tissues fail, by feeble perpetuative force, to evolve healthy intellect. When the formative forces fail to construct as perfect a brain-structure as has existed, renewal is required more and more often, which cannot be brought about by the impaired nerve-forces, and softening must, necessarily, follow or, at least, a mal-renewal and mal-construction of cells and neuroglia, too unnatural to evolve the elements of healthy mind.