[119] Gall,
another great initiator of modern views, likewise asserted a monthly cycle
in men. He insisted that there is a monthly critical period, more marked
in nervous people than in others, and that at this time the complexion
becomes dull, the breath stronger, digestion more laborious, while there
is sometimes disturbance of the urine, together with general _malaise_, in
which the temper takes part; ideas are formed with more difficulty, and
there is a tendency to melancholy, with unusual irascibility and mental
inertia, lasting a few days. More recently Stephenson, who established the
cyclical wave-theory of menstruation, argued that it exists in men also,
and is really "a general law of vital energy."[120]
Sanctorius does not appear to have published the data on which
his belief was founded. Keill, an English, follower of
Sanctorius, in his _Medicina Statica Britannica_ (1718),
published a series of daily (morning and evening) body-weights
for the year, without referring to the question of a monthly
cycle. A period of maximum weight is shown usually, by Keill's
figures, to occur about once a month, but it is generally
irregular, and cannot usually be shown to occur at definite
intervals. Monthly discharges of blood from the sexual organs and
other parts of the body in men have been recorded in ancient and
modern times, and were treated of by the older medical writers as
an affliction peculiar to men with a feminine system.
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