39 



nual necessity of renewed emotions : all their actions tend to the obtain- 

 ing agreeable or disagreeable sensations; for in the absence of other sen- 

 sations, pain is sometimes attended \vith enjoyment. Those who have 

 exhausted every kind of enjoyment, and who have had no pleasures un- 

 gratified, are led to suicide from a weariness of life; who can live, when 

 all power of feeling is gone? 



The following is the most extraordinary and remarkable instance 

 known, of the manner in which habit and a frequent repetition of the 

 same impressions, wear out by degrees the sensibility of organs. A shep- 

 herd, about the age of fifteen, became addicted to onanism, and to such a 

 degree, as to practise it seven or eight times in a day. Emission became 

 at last so difficult, that he would strive for an hour, and then discharge 

 only a few drops of blood. At the age of six and twenty his hand became 

 insufficient, all he could do, was to keep the penis in a continual state of 

 priapism. He then bethought himself of tickling the internal part of 

 his urethra, by means of a bit of wood six inches long, and he would 

 spend in that occupation several hours, while tending his flock in the 

 solitude of the mountains. By a continuation of this titillation for six- 

 teen years, the canal of the urethra became hard, callous, and insensible. 

 The piece of wood then became as ineffectual as his hand; at last, after 

 much fruitless effort, he one day, in despair, drew from his pocket a 

 blunt knife, and made an incision into his glans, along the course of the 

 urethra; this operation, which would have been painful to any ojK^else; 

 was in him attended with a sensation of pleasure, followed by a copious 

 emission. He had recourse to his new discovery, every time his desires 

 returned. When after an incision into the cavernous bodies the 

 blood flowed profusely, he stopped the hemorrhage, by applying around 

 the penis a pretty tight ligature. At last, after repeating the same pro- 

 cess, perhaps a thousand times, he ended in splitting his penis into two 

 equal parts, from the meatus urinarius to the scrotum, very near to the 

 symphysis pubis. When he had got so far, unable to carry his incision 

 any farther, and again reduced to new privations, he had recourse to a 

 piece of wood, shorter than the former : he introduced it into what re- 

 mained of the urethra, and exciting at pleasure the extremities of the 

 ejaculatory ducts, he provoked easily the discharge o^Semen. He con- 

 tinued this about ten years, after that long space of time, he one day in- 

 troduced his bit of wood so carelessly, that it slipped from his fingers and 

 dropped into the bladder. Excruciating pain and serious symptoms 

 came on. The patient was conveyed to the Hospital at Narbonne. The 

 surgeon, surprised at the sight of two penes of ordinary size, both capa- 

 ble of erection, and in that stage diverging on both sides, and seeing be- 

 sides from the scars and from the callous edges of the division, that this 

 conformation was not congenital, obliged the patient to give him an ac- 

 count of his life, which he did, with the details which have been related. 

 This wretch was cut as for the stone, recovered of the operation, but 

 died three months after, of an abcess in the right side of the chest, his 

 phthisical state having been evidently brought on by the practice of 

 onanism carried on nearly forty years*. 



The habit of suffering, renders us in the end insensible to pain; but 

 every thing in this world is balanced, and if habit lightens our evils, by 



* Chopart, maladies des voies urinaires. Tome II. 



