A practical treatise on impotence, sterility and allied disorders of the male sexual organs / by Samuel W. Gross.

  • Gross, Samuel W. (Samuel Weissell), 1837-1889.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on impotence, sterility and allied disorders of the male sexual organs / by Samuel W. Gross. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    bougie, even of small size, is arrested and prevented from entering the bladder, while if the surgeon, at the sam<: examination, will take a steel sound as large as the canal will admit the sound passes in with extreme readiness, although accompanied with much pain. If an organic stricture were present, the sound would be arrested in the same manner as the bougie would be. It is yet an open question whether the contraction near the meatus is a normal or an abnormal condition of affairs, inasmuch as there is a physiological narrowing at the pos- terior portion of the fossa navicularis where so many of the so-called contractions near the meatus are apt to occur. I, myself, am extremely sceptical about a large number of contractions of the urethral meatus.] As the knowledge of the connection between stricture of the urethra from masturbation and impotence, prosta- torrhcea, and seminal incontinence is of the utmost im- portance in regard to the treatment of these affections, I still further extended my investigations in this direction by an examination of fifty-six onanists in the Insane Depart- ment of the Philadelphia Hospital and the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. Of twenty-seven inmates whose histories could be traced back, eighteen declared that they never had gonorrhoea. These were either epileptics, who, when their mental faculties are not enfeebled, are as capa- ble of giving sensible accounts of themselves as others not so affected, or the subjects of chronic insanity or dementia, of whom it is characteristic that, if they remember anything at all, they can recall even the most trifling incidents that may have happened prior to the attack of insanity. In four other instances it was improbable that the patients ever had gonorrhoea, since they had been imbecile from childhood. In the remaining five cases, the question of gonorrhoea could not be entertained, because the subjects were ad-