(O. Adler, _Die Mangelhafte
Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes_, 1904, pp. 26-29.) The
phenomena in this case may be regarded as fairly typical, but
there are many individual variations; mucus emissions and vaginal
contractions frequently occur before actual orgasm, and there is
not usually any insertion of the finger into the vagina in women
who have never experienced coitus, or, indeed, even in those who
have.
We must now turn to that aspect of our subject which in the past has
always seemed the only aspect of auto-erotic phenomena meriting attention:
the symptoms and results of chronic masturbation. It appears to have been
an Englishman who, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, first
called popular attention to the supposed evils of masturbation. His book
was published in London, and entitled: _Onania, or the Heinous Sin of
Self-pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences in both Sexes,
Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice_, etc. It is not a serious
medical treatise, but an early and certainly superior example of a kind of
literature which we have since become familiar with through the daily
newspapers. A large part of the book, which is cleverly written, is
devoted in the later editions to the letters of nervous and
hypochondriacal young men and women, who are too shy to visit the author,
but request him to send a bottle of his "Strengthening Tincture," and
mention that they are inclosing half a guinea, a guinea, or still larger
sum.
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