Concerning the composition of the "Strengthening Tincture" we are not
informed.[316] This work, which was subsequently attributed to a writer
named Bekkers, is said to have passed through no less than eighty
editions, and it was translated into German. Tissot, a physician of
Lausanne, followed with his _Traite de l'Onanisme: Dissertation sur les
Maladies produites par la Masturbation_, first published in Latin (1760),
then in French (1764), and afterward in nearly all European languages. He
regarded masturbation as a crime, and as "an act of suicide." His book is
a production of amusing exaggeration and rhetoric, zealously setting forth
the prodigious evils of masturbation in a style which combines, as
Christian remarks, the strains of Rousseau with a vein of religious piety.
Tissot included only manual self-abuse under the term "onanism;" shortly
afterward, Voltaire, in his _Dictionnaire Philosophique_, took up the
subject, giving it a wider meaning and still further popularizing it.
Finally Lallemand, at a somewhat later period (1836), wrote a book which
was, indeed, more scientific in character, but which still sought to
represent masturbation as the source of all evils. These four writers--the
author of _Onania_, Tissot, Voltaire, Lallemand--are certainly responsible
for much. The mistaken notions of many medical authorities, carried on by
tradition, even down to our own time; the powerful lever which has been
put into the hand of unscrupulous quacks; the suffering, dread, and
remorse experienced in silence by many thousands of ignorant and often
innocent young people may all be traced in large measure back to these
four well-meaning, but (on this question) misguided, authors.
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