A Trea­tise on the Use of Flog­ging in Med­i­cine and Ven­ery Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1898

First trans­lated to Eng­lish from Latin in 1761 and pub­lished in London.

Copy of below page from http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jmark/meibom/4–5.html

COPY OF TEXT FROM ABOVE BOOK ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 1639

FIRST PUBLISHED BY JOHANN HEINRICH MEIBOM, TRACTUS DE USU FLAGRORUM IN RE MEDICA & VENERIA, 1639.

JOHANN HEINRICH MEIBOM (JOHN HENRY MEIBOMIUS), 1590–1655

Writ­ten to the famous Chris­tianus Cas­sius, Bishop of

Lubeck, and Privy Coun­cil­lor to the Duke of Holstein

BY

JOHN HENRY MEIBOMIUS, M.D.

Trans­lated from the Latin by a Physician

PARIS

ISIDORE LISEUX

MDCCCXCVIII

Five hun­dred copies.

Printed in France.

C. Unzinger, Paris.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Books which treat upon sub­jects of this curi­ous nature, being as liable to the cen­sure of the inju­di­cious as to the praise and admi­ra­tion of the know­ing, it may not be amiss to premise some obser­va­tions to the reader in defence of the work.

 

The author him­self was a man of great rep­u­ta­tion, an emi­nent physi­cian, and an excel­lent philologer; and had he fore­seen any ill effects from a trea­tise of this sort, he would hardly have risked his fame and prac­tice by suf­fer­ing it to be pub­lished. A bishop desired him to write it, and took care to spread it into as many hands as print­ing could; and it was attended with the improve­ments of two emi­nent physi­cians in the last edi­tion. [1570] But it may be objected that it was writ­ten in a lan­guage only famil­iar to the learned, so that it could do no harm in that tongue, as if learn­ing was a charm for human infir­mi­ties, and Latin and Greek could con­jure down the vices and pas­sions of mankind. Alas! we find nei­ther learn­ing nor learned orna­ments are proof against human­ity; and there is no more sanc­ti­fy­ing qual­ity in a coat of one colour than another. The devil of the flesh works in black as well as red.

 

In fact, it is true that the fault is not in the sub­ject mat­ter, but the incli­na­tion of the reader, that makes these pieces offen­sive. He who will deter peo­ple from vice must make it odi­ous by explain­ing its con­se­quences — which is effec­tu­ally done in this trea­tise. The chastest ear in the world is not pol­luted by a rela­tion of the prodi­gies in lewd­ness; nor ought any man to be offended at a nat­u­ral­ist who searches into the causes of the dis­tem­per, and shows how they may pro­ceed from the springs of nature her­self, with­out hav­ing recourse to fancy, fic­tion, and ridicu­lous dia­bol­i­cal enchantments.

 

That the use of strokes and stripes has an effect upon the lan­guid organs after our author’s man­ner of rea­son­ing, is no won­der at all to the learned, though the igno­rant may be star­tled at the asser­tion. I crave leave to for­tify our author’s obser­va­tions by a very com­mon one used among our­selves. It is the cus­tom, when a stal­lion will not read­ily cover a mare, to beat him with staffs upon the back and so quicken the cir­cu­la­tion of the blood, and stim­u­late the parts of gen­er­a­tion to a com­pli­ance with the pur­pose of nature. The effect is plain, and the argu­ment will hold in pro­por­tion with the human species.

 

I am here tempted to say some­thing of a more dan­ger­ous and mod­ern improve­ment in the art of lewd­ness, of which I know one or two remark­able his­to­ries — and, per­haps, when I have fin­ished the phys­i­cal rea­sons of its effects, the world may see them pub­lished. In the mean­time the hanging-lechers are desired to observe that their prac­tice is no secret, and that it is known that some of them have lately had very nar­row escapes in the exper­i­ment, and instead of con­tribut­ing to their species, have gone near to have destroyed it. A late unac­count­able secret of mur­der tends very much this way, and so do some others.

 

A LETTER FROM THOS. BARTHOLIN

TO HENRY MEIBOMIUS

ON THE MEDICAL USE OF RODS

Your father, John Henry Mei­bomius, deserves to be reck­oned among the prin­ci­pal orna­ments of the age: but you, who are the heir and suc­ces­sor of his virtues, take care to spread his fame, and increase his rep­u­ta­tion, by pub­lish­ing his writ­ings. He con­tin­u­ally adorned the divine art he pecu­liarly pro­fessed with a vari­ety of learn­ing; nor do you take less pains than your father to obtain the name of a learned physi­cian. The writ­ings of your father already pub­lished upon the ‘Oath of Hip­pocrates,’ and the ‘Life of Mecæ­nas,’ prove how great a man he was. You give a promis­ing earnest to pos­ter­ity what a son you are, by pub­lish­ing to the world your father’s lucubra­tions now in your hands, and wor­thy the most curi­ous eye, tak­ing care to increase them with your own excel­lent addi­tions. Among the vast com­pass of your father’s learn­ing and his more seri­ous stud­ies, he some­times descended to things of less moment and wrote, at the instance of the great Chris­tianus Cas­sius (whose mem­ory will be ever grate­ful to me), a short dis­ser­ta­tion, col­lected from antiq­uity, of the med­i­c­i­nal use of flog­ging. This trea­tise my book­seller, excited by the uncom­mon­ness of the sub­ject, had a mind to reprint, and desired some addi­tions to it from me. I referred him to you, the author’s son, Pro­fes­sor of Physic at the Uni­ver­sity of Juliers and, by the exam­ple of your father, con­ver­sant in all kind of lit­er­a­ture and antiq­uity, as being more nearly con­cerned in the rep­u­ta­tion of your father’s writ­ings, and it not being to be expected that a book which shines so much in the con­tents of its author should receive the least orna­ment from my hand. But although you were not want­ing to your father’s fame in send­ing back the book, enlarged with many addi­tions, together with an ele­gant epis­tle, yet Paulli­nus, my book­seller, with a view of mak­ing it an hon­est gain, has entreated me to add some few obser­va­tions, which he fan­cies I have always ready by me on all occa­sions. That I might not baulk his hopes nor fail in the duty I owe to the Mei­bomiuses and the Cas­siuses, and to profit the pub­lic too -

That com­mon care of ev’ry heav’nly power -

I have, among my other stud­ies, which my friends know I am employed in, col­lected a few twigs to add to your bun­dle of rods, and ded­i­cate them to your and your father’s hon­our. Few before you have taken notice of the use of rods in physic; it is cer­tain that very few care for them, since gen­tle and easy meth­ods please our patients best, and they are star­tled at sev­erer med­i­cines, though the con­di­tion of mor­tal­ity is such that even when we desire to use them most gen­tly, we very often nei­ther can nor dare. Hippocrates’s chains are now and then to be called in, and a sev­erer dis­ci­pline is to be used on obsti­nate distempers.

Strokes and stripes most effec­tu­ally cure those who dis­sem­ble dis­eases. It has often hap­pened that per­sons who have shammed an epilepsy have grown well and been cured before they have been sick by this sharp and whole­some rem­edy. It has done good too as a pre­ven­ta­tive physic, by hin­der­ing oth­ers from impos­ing dis­tem­pers upon the world. I have known lazy ser­vants, who have dis­sem­bled some strange dis­tem­per, return to their busi­ness by this dis­ci­pline. We can the less doubt that strokes con­tribute to the cure of real bod­ily dis­tem­pers since they cure those of the soul. Hence it is that you may see in Italy, in Lent-time, the Order of Fla­gel­lants expi­at­ing the sins of their past lives by swing­ing strokes and wounds upon their backs, like those in the rites of Cybele of old, who, as Clau­dian (Eutrop. Bk. 1) says -

To wound their breasts, their Phry­gian knives display,

And cut the pounders and the nerve away.

Such, among the hea­then, were the Syr­ian flog­gers, who pun­ished them­selves for their crimes, or were hired by oth­ers to do it, by stoutly flog­ging with a knot­ted whip, as Apuleius describes them in the eighth book of his Meta­mor­pho­sis. Circe’s rod was of another kind, that trans­formed the human minds of Ulysses’ com­pan­ions into beasts, par­tic­u­larly hogs, accord­ing to Homer in the Odyssy. But this is all mag­i­cal stuff — yet the moral of it proves that some return to their senses by blows, and oth­ers lose them. The meta­mor­pho­sis is cer­tain, but the form is dif­fer­ent, though nei­ther the one nor the other can be done by enchant­ment. I myself have seen sev­eral cor­rected with rods by the priests at Padua, who were thought to be pos­sessed with an evil spirit; but who, as the physi­cians rightly observe from the simil­i­tude of their symp­toms, had really epilep­tic fits, and to such per­sons flog­ging could do no harm, because it raised the nat­ural heat of their bod­ies. The man pos­sessed with the unclean spirit in St. Mark V, cut him­self with stones; and St. Paul com­plains in II Corinthi­ans that he was buf­fet­ted with fits, or joints of the fin­gers, as Mar­tinius in hi ety­molo­gies explains the word from Var­i­nus, though Hay­man, Bishop of Hal­ber­stadt, thinks this buf­fet­ting should rather be expounded by the fire of lust, kin­dled by the devil, than any pain in the head. That flog­ging was used in the cure of dis­tem­pers for­merly, Mei­bomius proves by many ancient author­i­ties, and that when there was no room for more mod­er­ate reme­dies; for whip­ping with rods among the Romans was used for fla­grant crimes and as the proper pun­ish­ment of slaves, whereas only freemen, as an argu­ment of lighter pun­ish­ment, were cor­rected by blows of sticks, as Bris­so­nius largely proves in his Antiq­ui­ties. The pas­sage in Cœlius Aure­lianus con­cern­ing the cure of mad­ness is a very ele­gant one, and is but slightly cited by your father, and there­fore I shall dwell upon it a lit­tle longer in order to make it a more effec­tual rem­edy, although Cœlius speaks it from the judg­ment of oth­ers, not his own, and par­tic­u­larly of Titus, the scholar of Escle­pi­ades, whose whole life we expect from that desir­able work, the ‘Lives of the Physi­cians,’ which you have promised us from your father’s papers. The words of Cœlius are these: ‘Oth­ers order them to be dis­ci­plined with rods that their under­stand­ing, being as it were quite ban­ished, they may come again to their senses: whereas the whip­ping of swelled parts only makes them the rougher, and when their fit begins to cease and they recover their senses, they are still vexed with the pain of whip­ping.’ So it stands in Rouvillius’s edi­tion, which I make use of, but your father reads it: ‘to ban­ish their mad­ness and make them recover.’ Now Cœlius, who was a methodist in physic, laughs at that man­ner of cure, partly because the swelled parts would be made rougher by the blows and the pain remain even after the cure, and partly because the cure does not respect the part affected — for he says: ‘If, as rea­son requires assis­tance to be given to the parts affected, and those near­est to them, they will be obliged to strike the face and head.’ But dis­tem­pers of the head are more increased by blows, that part being hurt by the least exter­nal force. And yet this med­i­cine of Titus, although some­what harsh, has its use; for he is not afraid of rais­ing the heat, because mad­ness is with­out fever or a small pulse, which dis­tin­guishes it from a frenzy. So it is the fear of pain which keeps the patient within the bounds of rea­son. Thus I knew a very hon­est man, who was often mad, forced by the threat­en­ings and blows of a stronger per­son to lie as quiet as a lamb. But the method of the relaxed parts is dif­fer­ent, which are raised by being struck with blows and pro­vok­ing the pain and heat; and yet the same Cœlius will not allow Themi­son, that the parts affected in this case are to be struck with a fer­ule, because he thinks they may be cured bet­ter, and re-corporated by bathing in salt water. But under the favour of this methodist, as salt water may be prop­erly sub­sti­tuted instead of the fer­ule, so both kinds of reme­dies excite the sense by their acri­mony, and re-corporation fol­lows both. What­ever the fer­ule effects, the salt water does — which, as Dias­corides says, is warm and acrid. Hence Scri­bo­nius uses the plas­ter Marine for renew­ing old, and cal­lous ulcers, for the relaxed parts are rather stupi­fied than revived by gen­tle appli­ca­tions. Strong fric­tions, strokes, and punc­tures are what must make them swell and rise again; this point, as Galen pre­scribes, as strik­ing the mac­er­ated parts with small fer­ules, lightly tinc­tured, till they be raised by degrees. By this method, a slavedealer in a short time plumped the but­tocks of a boy who was almost con­sumed with hunger, using daily, or at least every other day, a mod­er­ate per­cus­sion of the parts. If Cœlius is ter­ri­fied by the pain of the rod, there are other reme­dies at hand in &Aelig;gæneta, Chap. XII, such as sheep­skin fresh drawn and still warm, applied to the parts, besides oth­ers observed by &Aelig;tius, Galen, and Avin­cenna. Apuleius tells us that the effem­i­nate Syr­i­ans armed them­selves by a preser­v­a­tive against the pains of whip­ping; and Beroal­dus guesses that this preser­v­a­tive was hold­ing the breath, which he proves from Pliny to be the con­trivance of an ani­mal called Meles; these crea­tures using upon a fright to stretch and swell up their skin and so remain insen­si­ble to the bites of dogs and strokes of men.

 

This cure by whip­ping, although it may seem rough, yet ought not a physi­cian to abstain from it, if it has a good effect. St. Austin, in his 50th epis­tle, speaks ele­gantly to this pur­pose: ‘A physi­cian is uneasy to a patient in a frenzy, and so is a father to an unruly son — the one by tying him down, and the other by whip­ping, but both by lov­ing them; but if they should neglect them and suf­fer them to per­ish, that false clemency is rather a cru­elty.’ Socrates, in the Gor­gias of Plato, says: ‘That a physi­cian should not indulge his patients in their appetites nor use many and high meats.’ For, as Ter­tul­lian against the Gnos­tics says: ‘That part of med­i­cine in which lancet, cau­ter­ies, burn­ing (and we may add stripes) are con­cerned, is a kind of bar­bar­ity; and yet to be cut, burnt, extended, bit­ten, are not there­fore evils, because they bring use­ful pains, nor are they to be for­born because they make us uneasy, but because they nec­es­sar­ily make uns uneasy they are to be used.’ The good effects excuse the hor­ror of the appli­ca­tion; for things are not to be esteemed good or evil by pain or plea­sure, but by their use­ful­ness or unuse­ful­ness. All things there­fore ought to be borne if ordered by a physi­cian, accord­ing to that old say­ing: ‘Go, Lic­tor, bind his hands, beat him, cover his head, and hang him on the tree.’ This is the rea­son why Mar­tial, Bk. II, Ep. 17, includes the use of whips in the instruc­tions for bar­bers. These whips were rough­ened and hard­ened by twist­ing the strands in strong knots to increase the pain and leave marks under the skin, as if impressed by strings or bones of ani­mals, or, as Apuleius expresses it: ‘imprinted with the crooked hoofs of sheep,’ so that it is no won­der that Cat­ul­lus, in his XXVth epi­gram to Thal­lus, when he threat­ens the whip to his hands and sides, calls them burnt or branded:

For fear the scrib­bling whip should brand

Your ten­der side and dainty hand.

But let anti­quar­ies look at this point. The physi­cian is some­times forced to as rough a rem­edy; for, as Seneca rightly observes: ‘Med­i­cine begins to have an effect on insen­si­ble bod­ies when they are so han­dled as to feel pain.’ Our coun­try­men pick the feath­ers off the breasts of the African hens and sting them with net­tles, to make them sit upon their eggs the more read­ily. When the throat is obstructed with a bone, we clap the patient lustily on the back, with the object of dis­lodg­ing the obstruc­tion. If the lower jaw­bone is either by immod­er­ate laugh­ter or yawn­ing dis­lo­cated, it is reduced by a hearty slap on the face, which very often causes mirth in com­pany. Among the Insub­res, as I have proved in my ‘Cento of His­to­ries,’ the dead fœtus is extracted from the mother by com­press­ing the belly strongly, or strik­ing it with wooden or steel balls. I have observed that boys, and men too, have been cured of piss­ing in bed by whipping.

Your father has proved by many exam­ples how much flog­ging pre­vails in vene­real affairs, which I need not repeat or offend the ears by a sec­ond read­ing, though I knew a per­son at Venice who could not be solicited to a love encounter any way but by the blows of his mistress’s fist, as Cupid is said to have com­pelled peo­ple to fol­low him by strik­ing them with a wand of hyacinth. We may fur­ther observe that not only men are excited to unlaw­ful and unsea­son­able plea­sures by flog­ging, but women are raised and inflamed by strokes to a more easy con­cep­tion. This was known to the Roman ladies, who offered their hands to be whipped by the Luperci to pro­mote con­cep­tion. Juve­nal speaks of this cer­e­mony in his sec­ond satire:

Bar­ren they die, a lovely Lyde mocks

Their hopes, though pic­tured teem­ing in the box;

In vain, before the quick Luperci band,

They crave con­cep­tion from the pas­sive hand.

Now there is an easy rea­son why the strik­ing of the palm should for­ward fecun­dity in the Roman ladies, with­out hav­ing recourse to super­sti­tion, to be drawn from the cir­cu­la­tion of the blood: for the blood, grow­ing warm in the hand from the strokes received, runs back to the heart, and from thence, by the arter­ies, to the womb which, being thus inflamed, is excited to lust and dis­posed for con­cep­tion. As to the fer­ule itself which was made use of in the feast of the Luperci, Fes­tus Pom­peius describes it thus — The Romans caled the Luperci ‘Crepi,’ from the crepi­tus or noise which they made when strik­ing; for it was their cus­tom at the feast to run about naked and strike with a fer­ule all the women they met. Now this fer­ule was made, as Demp­ster con­jec­tures, of a cover of skin or hide, and that either of a dog or goat, either to increase the sound or the pain. Plutarch calls that kind of strik­ing a pur­ga­tion, and I remem­ber hav­ing read these lines in Ovid:

On the right hand the fruit­ful lashes bear,

And glad your house and father with a heir.

Juve­nal, in the pas­sage already quoted, ridicules these strokes; and Pru­den­tius, in his Roman mar­tyr, sat­i­rizes it as a fool­ish custom:

What means that fool­ish pomp, that filthy show,

When through the streets the mad Luperci go!

It shows you vile and mean as you behave,

For who can think him other than a slave

Who, danc­ing through the town, the dames provoke,

To fan­cied preg­nancy, by fool­ish stroke?

We have shown how this cus­tom may be war­ranted from a nat­ural rea­son, though the Luperci might have a trick at the bot­tom, strik­ing the women with other things than the fer­ule, as Car­dan imag­ines. Among some nations, such as the Per­sians and Rus­sians, the mar­ried women take it as a token of love from their hus­bands to be soundly beaten. Bar­clay says of the Russ­ian wives that they esti­mate the kind­ness of their hus­bands from the strokes they give them, and are never more happy than when they have met with a man of bar­barous tem­per. Olear­ius, that great trav­eller, denies that he met any such thing; but Bar­clay con­firms it by a very sin­gu­lar instance, which I shall take the lib­erty of repeat­ing. ‘A cer­tain fel­low, Jor­danes, if his name is of any moment in such a tri­fle, had trav­elled from Ger­many to Mus­covy; there he set­tled and, lik­ing the place, mar­ried a wife of the coun­try. He loved the woman very much and, desir­ing by all means a mutual affec­tion from her, observed her still melan­choly, with down­cast eyes, often sigh­ing and betray­ing other signs of a dis­con­tented mind. But when her hus­band enquired the cause of her afflic­tion, affirm­ing that he was not want­ing in love and respect, — “Oh,” replies the wife, “aren’t you a fine dis­sem­bler of love! D’ye think I don’t know how despi­ca­ble I am to you?” and imme­di­ately she fell into a fit of cry­ing and sigh­ing. The man, quite aston­ished, began to embrace her and ask in what way he had offended her, so that he might make amends in the future. And the woman answered: “Where are your blows and beat­ings, the proofs of your love? Sure it is that in this coun­try they are the only proofs we accept.” When Jor­danes heard this, his amaze­ment at first hin­dered his laugh­ter, but soon after, when both were over, he thought it for his inter­est to use her as she had pre­scribed, and not long after took an occa­sion to beat her; and she, grow­ing into good humour by the influ­ence of the cud­gel, from that time for­ward began to love and esteem her hus­band in earnest.’ Petrus Petræus, in his chron­i­cle of Mus­covy, tells us the same story with this addi­tion, that hus­bands usu­ally pro­vided whips after their wed­ding for the same pur­pose, and reckon them among the house­hold gods. Per­haps we may draw a rea­son from this bitter-sweet love, for these beat­ings are not used by way of cor­rec­tion or amend­ment: for bad women (if there are any such) are nei­ther to be restrained by threat­en­ings or pas­sion, no, not even if you were to beat out their teeth with a flint, as Simonides expresses it in his frag­ment pre­served by Sto­bæus; but a good hus­band is so far from tor­ment­ing the dear wife of his bosom with strokes, that he had rather do as the man in Seneca did, afflict him­self and make his wife suf­fer by proxy.

I have deter­mined, as your father has, that by flog­ging of the loins and heat­ing the reins, the mat­ter of the seed is either quick­ened or increased, and how that should be per­formed by the cir­cu­la­tion of the blood in the reins I have long since shown in my ‘Anatomy Reformed;’ all which, if it will not sat­isfy the learned, I have noth­ing to do but to have recourse with you to the com­mon cause, the heat of the blood, inflamed by flog­ging the loins to increase the warmth of the reins and pro­voke a vene­real appetite. From hence the supine sit­u­a­tion of the body con­tributes to emis­sions in sleep, by irri­tat­ing the heat of the loins; from hence the same parts are pro­voked to ven­ery by vio­lent fric­tion, a plea­sure which cost a cer­tain gen­tle­man his life in Paris; and, lastly, we apply cool­ing med­i­cines to the loins in a trou­ble­some gon­or­rhœa. Actu­ar­ius applies plas­ters to the reins, which strengthen but do not heat. But Orib­a­sius applies lead plates to the loins, and in this case dis­tin­guishes the loins from the reins: for, in his frag­ment ‘Of Proper Diet for all Sea­sons of the Year,’ which was first pub­lished at Basil by Albanus Tor­i­nus, 1528, he seri­ously advises against cool­ing the loins too much, for fear of cool­ing the reins by that means. I shall say no more of the func­tion of the reins towards the gen­er­at­ing of the seed, because the famous Wal­læus has called it in ques­tion from the prin­ci­ples of cir­cu­la­tion, and he was a per­son whose scholar I shall always be proud to own myself. That was a heresy of those days which had many fol­low­ers and many mas­ters, and, begin­ning with great heat, was sen­si­bly extin­guished. Now the curios­ity of the inge­nious is turned another way, and new employ­ments suc­ceed to the old since the learned physi­cians have begun to search with more eager­ness into the hid­den secrets of the human sys­tem, and not to rest con­tented with dis­cov­er­ies which were hith­erto rather believed than demon­strated. Farewell.

Hages­tadt, Oct. 24, 1669.

J. BARTHOLIN

 

THE USE OF FLOGGING

Receive at last, my dear friend Cas­sius, the essay I promised you over a bot­tle, upon the uncom­mon sub­ject of the use of rods, and the con­se­quence of that sub­ject — a dis­course on the prin­ci­pal offices of the loins and reins. You may remem­ber I engaged to send it to you, when we supped together with our inti­mate friend, Mar­tin Gerde­sius, coun­sel­lor to your most excel­lent prince, and your col­league. I can’t well rec­ol­lect the first occa­sion of it, any fur­ther than that I affirmed that stripes and strokes were of use in the cure of some dis­tem­pers, which both of you looked upon as a para­dox: upon which I began to assert the truth of my obser­va­tions from expe­ri­ence, and appeal to the physi­cians who, in many of their writ­ings, affirm the same. For instance, it is long since Titus, a dis­ci­ple of Ascle­pi­ades (who flour­ished in Augustus’s time, as I have shown in the ‘Lives of the Physi­cians’) directs us, in his book on the soul, that mad­men are to be man­aged by strips and blows, and their senses to be restored by that dis­ci­pline. Cœlius Aure­lianus, I, 5, ‘On the Reg­u­la­tion of the Pas­sions,’ informs us that it was no uncom­mon thing to order per­sons grown melan­choly, or mad with love, to be beaten and cor­rected; and that the method very often answered and brought the patients to a right use of their rea­son. In his chap­ter on Con­ti­nence, Rhases cites an emi­nent Jew­ish physi­cian who, when all other means were unsuc­cess­ful, directs those mad for love to be bound and soundly beaten; ay, and to repeat the exper­i­ment often, if a good effect did not imme­di­ately fol­low — since (as he mer­rily applies the proverb) it is not one swal­low that makes the sum­mer. Guainer­ius, in his ‘Prac­ti­cal Trea­tises,’ agrees with Rhases. Vales­cus de Taranta is also of the same opin­ion, and I shall cite his words: ‘If the patient be young, let him be flogged on the but­tocks with rods; and if the mad­ness is not so cured, let him be put into a dark hole and dieted with bread and water till he returns to his senses, and let this dis­ci­pline be con­tin­ued.’ If we are to believe Seneca, some quar­tans have been cured by blows, per­haps from the strokes warm­ing the vis­cid bil­ious humour, and dis­si­pat­ing them by motion, as Lip­sius con­jec­tures in his com­men­taries. Hierony­mus Mer­cu­sialis tells us in his ‘Art of Exer­cise’ that some physi­cians advised lean per­sons to be whipped in order to plump their bod­ies; and Galen proved the truth of this long ago, from the prac­tices of slavedeal­ers. For it is cer­tain that the flesh is raised by that prac­tice, and so the food is more forcibly attracted to it; besides, it is a vul­gar obser­va­tion and exper­i­ment to cure relaxed limbs by whip­ping them with bun­dles of net­tles, and so acti­vat­ing the cir­cu­la­tion; besides which, Themi­son advises the strik­ing them with a fer­ule. Elidæus of Padua in his ‘Med­ical Obser­va­tions’ does not scru­ple to for­ward the erup­tion of small­pox by order­ing the ten­der bod­ies of infants to be stung with net­tles. Thomas Cam­panella, a monk of the order of the Preach­ers, whom I for­merly knew at Naples, tells us an almost incred­i­ble story of the use of blows in an obstruc­tion of the belly. He relates in his book on Physic that a prince of Italy, famous for his skill in music, could never go to stool unless he were beaten by a ser­vant whom he kept for that pur­pose. He adds that this effect might fol­low from fear forc­ing the spir­its into the intestines — which rea­son I shall not dis­pute at present.

But what you could not so read­ily believe upon my affir­ma­tion was, that there are per­sons who are stim­u­lated to ven­ery by strokes of the rod, and worked into a flame of lust by blows; and that the part which dis­tin­guishes us to be men, should be raised by the charm of invig­o­rat­ing lashes. But I will con­vince you that it is so; and when I have proved by the tes­ti­mony of no vul­gar authors that there are many exper­i­ments of the truth of it, I shall add some rea­sons and argu­ments why oth­ers have con­ceived it, and why I think it pos­si­ble and prac­ti­ca­ble. I shall not make many words of the sting­ing the parts with young net­tles. For Monytius Taven­tius, in his sec­ond book of the ‘Organs of Gen­er­a­tion,’ asserts that if steril­ity be sus­pected from the short­ness of the penis, that the defect may be amended and the part extended by the use of that dis­ci­pline; besides, your admired petro­n­ius pre­scribes the same method to excite a lan­guid inapt­ness to plea­sure. Eucol­pio says: ‘That part of my body in which I was for­merly a very Her­cules, was quite lan­guid and dead — it retired, cold as it was, colder than win­ter, into my belly, and cov­ered with a thou­sand wrin­kles, more like a leather bag in water than a man.’ When Enothea, the priest­ess of Pri­a­pus, had promised him that she would make it as stiff as a horn, she mixed up the juice of water­cresses with south­ern­wood and besprin­kled his thigs. Then she took a rod of young net­tles and gen­tly stung all the parts from the navel.

But I am to give you an account of a rougher and stronger fla­gel­la­tion, AND THE FIRST I shall cite on this head is Johannes Pieus, Count of Miran­dola, who flour­ished about a cen­tury and a half ago. In his third book against the astrologers, he relates this of an acquain­tance: ‘There is now alive a man of a prodi­gious and almost unheard-of kind of lech­ery, for he is never inflamed to plea­sure but when he is whipt; and yet he is so intent on the act, and longs for the strokes with such an earnest­ness, that he blames the flog­ger that uses him gen­tly, and is never thor­oughly mas­ter of his wishes unless the blood starts and the whip rages smartly over his limbs. This crea­ture begs the favour of the woman whom he is to enjoy, brings her a rod him­self, soaked and hard­ened in vine­gar a day before for the same pur­pose, and entreats the bless­ing of a whip­ping from the har­lot on his knees; and the more smartly he is whipt, he rages the more eagerly, and goes the same pace both to plea­sure and pain — a sin­gu­lar instance of one who finds a delight in the midst of tor­ment; and he is not a man very vicious in other respects, he acknowl­edges his dis­tem­per and abhors it.’ So far Picus, from whom Nevizanus in his ‘Mar­riage Rites,’ and Cam­panella in the place before cited, quotes it. If I am not mis­taken, there is another per­son much like Picus’s acquain­tance men­tioned by Cœlius Rhodig­i­nus in his ‘Ancient Read­ings.’ He says: ‘It is cer­tain, upon the oath of cred­i­ble per­sons, that not many years since there lived a man, not of a sala­cious­ness resem­bling that of cocks, but of a more won­der­ful and almost incred­i­ble sort of lech­ery — who, the more stripes he received, was the more hur­ried to coition. The case was prodi­gious, since it was a ques­tion which he desired most — the blows, or the act itself, unless the plea­sure of the lat­ter was mea­sured by the num­ber of the for­mer; besides, it was his man­ner to heighten the smart­ness of the rod with vine­gar the day before it was to be used, and then to request the dis­ci­pline with vio­lent entreaties. But if the flog­ger seemed to work slowly, he flew into a pas­sion and abused her. He was never con­tented unless the blood flowed — a rare instance of a man who went an equal pace to plea­sure and to pain, and who, in the midst of tor­ture, either sat­is­fied or excited a pleas­ing tit­il­la­tion, and a furi­ous itch of lust.’ We may add another of the same nature to these, from Otho Brun­sel­sius, a famous physi­cian who, in his ‘Phys­i­cal Dic­tio­nary,’ Art. Coition, says: ‘At Munich, the seat of the Duke of Bavaria, there lived a man who could never enjoy his wife if he was not soundly flogged to it before he made the attempt.’ I sub­join a new and late instance, which hap­pened in this city of Lubeck, where I now reside. A cit­i­zen, a cheese­mon­ger by trade, was cited before the mag­is­trates for, among other crimes, adul­tery, and, the fact being proved, he was ban­ished. A cour­te­san with whom this fel­low had often an affair, con­fessed before the state deputies that he could never have a forcible erec­tion and per­form a man’s part till she had whipped him on the back with rods, and that when the busi­ness was over he could not be brought to a rep­e­ti­tion unless excited by a sec­ond flog­ging. The adul­terer at first denied the charge, but being seri­ously pressed about the sub­ject, he con­fessed the fact.

For the truth of this nar­ra­tion I appeal to the judges appointed by the sen­ate, Thomas Storningius and Adrian Mollerus, my friends who, as you know, are still liv­ing. Besides, it is not many years since that a per­son of a small post in a noted town in Hol­land, very much addicted to ven­ery, was caught in the very act with a woman whom he could never effec­tu­ally enjoy with­out being stim­u­lated by flog­ging. The poor man, upon an infor­ma­tion to the mag­is­trates, paid severely for his lust by the loss of his office.

O’er the whole town the noted story rolled,

By merry cits at every meet­ing told!

Now, since I believe you nei­ther can nor would deny the truth of these instances, let us next con­sider what rea­son can be given for an action so odd and uncom­mon. If you have recourse to the astrologers, they will impute the whole of the busi­ness to the stars, and accuse heaven that some­times pro­vokes such an appetite in man by a pecu­liar and hid­den influ­ence. They will sy, as Picus expresses it, that the man’s propen­sity to Venus was caused in his gen­i­ture, and des­tined to flog­ging by oppo­site and threat­en­ing rays of the stars — on which sub­ject Fran­cis­cus Junct­i­nus takes a great deal of pains to instruct us in his book on the ‘Cal­cu­la­tion of Nativ­i­ties.’ But since the heav­ens and the stars are uni­ver­sal causes and so can­not occa­sion such par­tic­u­lar effects in one or two indi­vid­u­als, Picus rejects their influ­ence and enquires after a nearer and more imme­di­ate rea­son. He thinks it was occa­sioned in his acquain­tance by cus­tom, for so he pro­ceeds in his nar­ra­tion: ‘When I seri­ously enquired of him the cause of this uncom­mon plague, his reply was, that he had used him­self to it from a boy. He had been edu­cated with a num­ber of wicked boys who set up this trade of whip­ping among them­selves and pur­chased of each other these infa­mous stripes at the expense of their mod­esty.’ Of the same opin­ion is Cœlius, quot­ing from Picus. He says: ‘Now, it is less won­der­ful that this uncom­mon vice should be known by the per­son, and that he should hate and con­demn him­self for it; by the force of a vicious habit gain­ing ground he prac­ticed a vice he dis­ap­proved. But it grew more obsti­nate and rooted in his nature from his using it from a child, when a rec­i­p­ro­cal fric­tion among his schoolfel­lows used to be pro­voked by the tit­il­la­tion of stripes — a strange instance what a power the force of edu­ca­tion has in graft­ing invet­er­ate bad habits on our morals.’ So far they: for my part, I don’t deny the great influ­ence of cus­tom, and Aris­to­tle has long since informed us, both in his trea­tise on ‘Mem­ory’ and his ‘Ethics,’ that it is a sort of sec­ond nature — which Ennius observes in these lines:

Long use and fre­quent think­ing, cus­tom make,

And this, with man, at last grows into nature.

Galen, in his book of ‘Habits,’ ele­gantly shows the great force and influ­ence of cus­tom. I allow, in the instance given by Picus and Cœlius, that cus­tom in a tract of time might con­tribute some­thing to the cause, but in the case pro­duced by Brun­sel­sius and mine, that cause will not answer. And again, as Cam­panella asks, why did not the rest of this youth­ful fra­ter­nity go on in the same way? for cus­tom only effects some­thing par­tic­u­lar in one or two indi­vid­u­als. Nei­ther is it prob­a­ble that all those boys we men­tioned began their youth with expos­ing their chastity to sale with this rec­i­p­ro­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion of vice, and used rods at the first to pro­voke lech­ery. I con­grat­u­late our Ger­many that these vices of per­verse lust, these dis­graces of chil­dren and mutual pol­lu­tions of males, are almost unknown among us and, if by acci­dent such a case hap­pens, the offend­ers are severely pun­ished by being burnt. ‘The Ger­mans know no such thing, and men live with more regard for moral­ity near the sea,’ said Quin­til­ian in his dec­la­ra­tion for the sol­dier Mar­i­anus, whose chastity had been attempted by a Tri­bune, on which I have dilated more in my com­men­tary on the death of Hip­pocrates. Since, then, nei­ther the stars nor cus­tom are the cause why stripes excite ven­ery, we must see if there be any other rea­son, in the search after which we must trace the mat­ter a lit­tle higher before we can explain it. We are to under­stand then that this flog­ging and whip­ping with rods was prac­tised on on part of the body but the back, which the Lubeck strum­pet con­fessed, and it is man­i­fest of all the rest; for it is impos­si­ble that the yard can bear the strokes of rods, undoubt­edly not to an erup­tion of the blood — and we all know the back is fre­quently used so. Now, the loins com­pose the chief part of the back: for that part of the body which takes its rise from the five ver­te­bræ placed below the ver­te­bræ of the tho­rax, is con­tin­ued quite to the os sacrum. These parts, the mus­cles, skin, and fat, cover out­wardly; inwardly, they are sur­rounded and braced by the mus­cles. The reins adjoin to these, one on each side, and take up about the space of four ver­te­bræ, and are annexed to the vena cava and the large artery: but the reins receive as well from the vena cava as the arte­ria magna large and notable ves­sels which are called emul­gents; each receives, on each side, one ves­sel, a vein, and and artery, which by many ram­i­fi­ca­tions are var­i­ously dis­persed into the sub­stance of the reins them­selves. On the right of the vena cava, just under the emul­gent, arises the right sem­i­nal vein; and in the same place, from the arte­ria magna, arises the sem­i­nal artery, both descend­ing into the right tes­ti­cle. On the left, the sem­i­nal artery aris­ing from the trunk of the arte­ria magna, and the sem­i­nal vein from the left vein of the emul­gent, are both inserted into the left tes­ti­cle. Besides these, there are nerves com­ing from the spinal cord that reach to the reins, and not only pierce their coats, but pen­e­trate their very sub­stance. Lastly, the ureters, pro­duced from the cav­ity of the reins them­selves, are inserted into the blad­der. As we may call all these by a sin­gle appel­la­tion of the loins, so we may very prop­erly assign one and the same com­mon use to them. Authors, indeed, have been very inquis­i­tive into the use of the sep­a­rate parts, but have not so well con­sid­ered what they alto­gether con­tribute to one com­mon use. Cagna­tus is of opin­ion that all of them, but each in a dif­fer­ent man­ner, are appro­pri­ated as well for the elab­o­rat­ing of the seed as per­form­ing the work of gen­er­a­tion, which the philoso­pher calls the most natural.

It is evi­dent from the unan­i­mous con­sent of all writ­ers, whether sacred or pro­fane, that antiq­uity attrib­utes some such office to the loins, reins, and sides. As for the Scrip­tures, they fre­quently appro­pri­ate the work of gen­er­a­tion to the loins, as in Gen. xxxv, 1: ‘Kings shall pro­ceed from thy loins.’ And in Heb. vii, 15, the sons of Abra­ham are said to have come from his loins. From whence Basil the Great, in his com­men­tary on Isa­iah, remarks that in many places of the Scrip­ture the loins are put for the organs of gen­er­a­tion. And Ori­gen, in Homily 5, on Psalm xxxvi, 8, upon the words: ‘My loins are filled with a sore dis­ease,’ states that the loins are said to be the recep­ta­cle of the human seed, from whence that kind of sin is here insin­u­ated which is the effect of lust. It is a proverb among the Hebrews, ‘to gird the loins,’ sig­ni­fy­ing to pre­serve their chastity and for­bear lewd­ness. In this sense God speaks to Job: ‘Gird up thy loins like a man,’ that is, restrain thy appetite like a brave man. Jerome sim­i­larly inter­prets Nahum: ‘Look upon thy way, strengthen thy loins and secure thy virtue.’ So also of John the Bap­tist, Mat. iii, 4: ‘who had a leath­ern gir­dle about his loins,’ and whom, on that account, Gre­gory Nazianzen and Nice­tus would have us imi­tate. In Pet. i, 19: ‘To be girt on the loins,’ sig­ni­fies — to drive lux­u­ri­ous thoughts from the sould. I am mis­taken, too, if the Romans had not this mean­ing in view when they accounted a per­son girt as an instance of mod­esty, reg­u­lar­ity, and a good mind; and ungirt, as a token of dis­solute morals, upon which head I have more to say in my Life of Mecæ­nas. At this very day it is the cus­tom in France to present those who win the poetry prize with a silken gir­dle, as a tro­phy to gird their loins with. To this pur­pose Ranch­i­nus, in his com­men­tary on Hippocrates’s oath, remarks on the neces­sity of a physi­cian being chaste: because a gir­dle sig­ni­fies a bind­ing of the reins, and an absti­nence from an immod­er­ate use of the loins. From hence the ancients though Diana, the god­dess of chastity, always wore a gir­dle; and from hence the words ‘to unloose the gir­dle,’ in the mar­riage cer­e­mony, denotes the loss of vir­gin­ity. &Aelig;tius rightly observes that the use of ven­ery is harm­ful to such as have weak reins and loins, and such per­sons are there­fore called broken-loined. Eustathius, in the Cat­a­logue of the Ships, recites a proverb on these persons:

Weak in the loins, as Mysius the ass, which Junius explains as being spo­ken of soft, effem­i­nate, and unloined men. Upon the same score is Petronius’s Satire: those of loose loins are those who were ener­vated by ven­ery, such as Cat­ul­lus speaks of, Ep. XVI:

Poor weakly things, who can­not move their loins.

To these, Mar­tial opposes, Book V:

Sala­cious loins for fre­quent motion apt.

And the author of a free poem says:

Ecquando Thele­tusa circulatrix,

Criss­abit tibi fluc­tu­ante lambo.

When will the clasp­ing Thele­tusa rise

To my embrace with wav­ing loins and thighs?

For ‘to fluc­tu­ate’ is to move often, and toss up and down in the man­ner of a wave. The Latins call it crissare: for that sig­ni­fies an immod­est kind of dance, which we now term Il Barga­m­asco, and which is never danced but by peo­ple in masks, Juve­nal speaks of them thus:

The danc­ing girls in wan­ton motions bend,

Shake as they rise, and with a clap descend.

Arnobius says of these rep­re­sen­ta­tions: ‘The las­civ­i­ous mul­ti­tude would run into the most extrav­a­gant pos­tures of the body, and caper, and sing, and turn them­selves round in a cir­cle, and at last, by the activ­ity of their loins, raise their pos­te­ri­ors and thighs into a swim­ming ele­gancy iof motion.’ You may con­sult, if you please, on this occa­sion, the epis­tle of Megara to Bac­chis, con­cern­ing Thryal­lis. Per­sius had this in view when, speak­ing of las­civ­i­ous verses which raise a pruri­ency in the audi­ence, he says:

Such lus­cious songs as pierce the secret chine,

Tickle the loins, and work the lust­ful spine.

And Juve­nal, speak­ing of the pipes at the Bona Dea, says:

When music and when wine to lust conspire,

Pro­voke the blood, and set the loins on fire.

Upon this account, Isidorus, in the pas­sage before recited, derives the word loins from the las­civ­i­ous­ness of lust, because both the cause and seat of cor­po­real plea­sure lies in them. Nico­laus Per­otius derives it more plainly from lubido: that lumbi comes from lubendo, by insert­ing ‘m’ as is fre­quent in derivations.

Again, as this office is attrib­uted to the loins, so it is to the reins, which are a part of the loins, and, in regard to the for­ma­tion of the body, a very prin­ci­pal one. That these admin­is­ter to gen­er­a­tion is hinted 2 Kings, viii, 12: ‘The son who comes out of the reins.’ From whence Ter­tul­lian, in his book on the Res­ur­rec­tion of the Flesh, calls the reins con­scious of seed. Hesy­chius the pres­byter, in his com­men­tary on Leviti­cus, says the reins are the ser­vants of the seed in coition, and St. Augustin, on the eighth Psalm, writes that the plea­sures of ven­ery are sig­ni­fied by the word reins. And St. Jerome, in his com­men­tary on Nahum, affirms that all the parts that con­tribute to coition come under the appel­la­tion of the reins, and he repeats almost the same words often in his com­men­tary on Ezekiel. Fur­ther, Nico­las Lyra explains these words of Jeremiah’s, and the same in Rev­e­la­tions: ‘Search­ing the reins and heart,’ as mean­ing the exam­in­ing and pun­ish­ing of libidi­nous and evil thoughts. For, in Scrip­ture lan­guage, the heart stands for thoughts, and the reins for con­cu­pis­cence. There­fore the Psalmist, in Ps. xxviii, desires God to purify his heart and reins; and the church, from him, uses it in the same sense in this hymn: ‘Purify our reins and heart by the fire of Thy Holy Spirit that we may serve Thee with a chaste body, and be accepted by Thee with a clean heart.’ The divines too, in gen­eral, under­stand by the pre­cept in Exo­dus to those who eat the Paschal Lamb, ‘to bind up their reins,’ an absti­nence from lust. Auso­nius has expressed the indul­gence of lust by the use of the reins. ‘Go, exer­cise thy reins.’ Ep. 13.

It is a com­mon jest among the vul­gar to say that those who sac­ri­fice to Venus purge their reins, which is the rea­son why Hip­pocrates, Aris­to­tle, Galen and many other physi­cians assert that an intem­per­ate use of ven­ery is prej­u­di­cal to the reins. Hence it is that the reins were ded­i­cated to Venus by the ancients: for Ful­gen­tius, in his Mythol­ogy, in the fable of Peleus and Thetis, cites Dem­ocri­tus to prove that the hea­then thought that every part of the human body was under the influ­ence of a pecu­liar deity; so they assigned the head to Jupiter, the arms to Juno, the eyes to Min­erva, the breast to Nep­tune, the waist to Mars, the reins to Venus, and the feet to Mercury.

Some say that renes is derived from varro, as if the canals of the obscene humours — that is, the seed — arose from them, and there is no rea­son why we should, as some have done, under­stand the urine by the obscene humour: for Isidorus, explain­ing varro, says: ‘The veins and mar­row dis­til a thin fluid into the reins, which liquor, being dis­solved, runs from the reins in the heat of the vene­real act, which no man in his senses can think spo­ken of the urine.’ The Hebrews, too, derive the reins from a word that imports concupiscence.

And now, because the reins ar sit­u­ated in the loins near the side, they too were believed to con­tribute to ven­ery and the work of gen­er­a­tion. Thus, the mod­estest of women accord­ing to fame, Pene­lope, when she was to make a trial of the strength and robust sides of her suit­ors, brings them to the bow and bids them stretch the string.

The bow­string none like my Ulysses drew,

Whether by sleight or strength his arrow flew;

Since he is dead, by that your pow­ers be tried.

Who proves his manly force and lusty side

Best by the bow, suc­ceeds him in his bride.

From whence, ‘to try the side,’ in Mar­tial, sig­ni­fies to give a trial of your strength in vene­real affairs. In Ovid, ii, 10, ‘to give strength to the sides’ is to excite lust.

Plea­sure is thus with nutri­ment supplied,

And gives a lusty vigour to the side.

And in Apuleius, viii, the ‘indus­try of the side’ is a potency in lust. ‘They brought,’ says he, ‘a lusty coun­try­man well fur­nished with an indus­try of sides, and a length of label.’ So in Juve­nal and Ovid, ‘to spare the sides’ is to abstain from ven­ery. Thus the for­mer, on the catamite, Sat. 6:

Nor is the case how much you spare your sides,

Or at what cost of breath the mas­ter rides.

And in the Art of Love, Bk. 2:

Spare not your sides, for all your hopes are there.

On the other hand, ‘to break the sides’ is to indulge plea­sure too much — Mar­tial, xi, 105:

He lets the sun behold his play,

And breaks his sides in open day.

And again, xii, 93:

You, Bas­sus, take a silly pride,

But ’tis with boys you burst your side.

So in Tibullus:

Unruly tumours, pant­ing for delight,

Erect their nerve, and stim­u­late the fight,

Nor cease to glow, till Venus often tried,

In mirth­ful plea­surs burst my lan­guid side.

Petro­n­ius in his Satire says: ‘I am afraid I should have raised con­vul­sions in my side.’ In other places the sides are said to be weak, worn out, ener­vated, drained, lan­guid, wea­ried — which all mean exhausted by ven­ery. Ovid, iii, 10, says:

I have beheld the wea­ried lover go

From the fair dame ridicu­lously slow,

His sides all faint, exhausted all below.

Cat­ul­lus, Ep. 7:

Why not dis­play thy dry, thy sap­less sides?

Pri­a­pus, in the Priapeia:

You see how dryly drained I fail,

All wasted, mea­gre, thin, and pale;

My sides are spent, a short drawn breath

And bloody cough por­tend my death.

 

Sue­to­nius, in the life of Caligula, has the fol­low­ing remark­able pas­sage: ‘Valerius Cat­ul­lus, a youth of a con­sular fam­ily, said pub­licly that Caligula was endorsed by him and that his sides were quite tired with the use of his bed­fel­low.’ Apuleius, Bk. 8, recites this man­ner of salu­ta­tion: ‘May you live long and please your mas­ters, and spare my now decayed sides.’ From all which my claim is as clear as the noon­tide sun.

 

And that this is no new or mod­ern opin­ion, but founded on the unan­i­mous con­sent of all antiq­uity, is evi­dent from the tes­ti­mony of the Scrip­ture, wherein the loins and the reins are said to con­tribute to the work of gen­er­a­tion. Now a gen­eral judg­ment of the learned can­not be totally false.

 

In the next place, it is worth our while to enquire fur­ther into the rea­sons upon which this opin­ion is founded; for by this means we shall, at the same time, dis­cover the cause why strokes and stripes inflicted on the loins are incen­tives to lust. Cagna­tus for his part, and Mon­tuus, who inclines to his opin­ion, attribute the whole busi­ness to the loins, as con­sist­ing of those parts we were just now recit­ing — that is, the ver­te­bræ, mus­cles, reins, veins, arter­ies, and nerves. How­ever, he makes the sem­i­nal veins and arter­ies the chief agents as being the parts which afford the mate­r­ial for the seed, and con­tain in them­selves, and send down to the tes­ti­cles, that whitish fluid which either actu­ally is, or soon will be, worked into seed; and he affirms that the desire of eject­ing the seed is excited by the swelling of this fluid in the blood­ves­sels, and from whence noc­tur­nal emis­sions are caused, espe­cially in such per­sons whose ves­sels are over­heated by lying on the back. Bartholomæus Mon­tag­nana and Nere­sius assign the whole oper­a­tion to the reins, and very lately the famous Sen­ner­tius, my very dear teacher and friend, is of the same opin­ion, and yet they do not all explain the mat­ter after the same man­ner. Mon­tag­nana in his study of Avi­cenna says we must dili­gently observe why he declares that the weak­ness of the reins may be said to be the cause of the defect of coition; and after he has affirmed that the sem­i­nal mat­ter has acquired an ade­quate per­fec­tion from the dis­po­si­tion and tem­pera­ment of the tes­ti­cles, he adds that it is nec­es­sary that the same mat­ter should be pre­dis­posed in the supe­rior mem­ber where the diges­tive fac­ulty is more pow­er­ful, as in the liver and reins; from whence he con­cludes it is impos­si­ble that a gen­uine seed should be formed unless those parts, the liver and reins, are duly orga­nized and com­plex­ioned in all its prop­er­ties. But Nere­sius is of the opin­ion that there is only a kind of salt­ness trans­mit­ted from the reins to the tes­ti­cles which excites a desire in the gen­i­tals, and so con­tributes to ven­ery. His words are: ‘The reins are the purg­ers of the blood and the cause of the appetite to coition: for the veins which, descend­ing to the tes­ti­cles, pass through the reins and there imbibe a salt humour and an irri­tat­ing fac­ulty, after the same man­ner as a sharp punc­ture under the skin makes an itch­ing, and, in the same degree as the con­sis­tence of the tes­ti­cle is softer than the skin itself, they so much the more, when stim­u­lated by that salt pun­gency, raise a furi­ous desire of emit­ting the seed.’ Matthæus’s opin­ion is much the same, only he attrib­utes more to the left rein than to the right: for, says he, the left sem­i­nal vein, sit­u­ated in the emul­gent near the left vein, fur­nishes a blood diluted with a good deal of serous salt, to raise and stim­u­late the parts to the act of gen­er­a­tion. Lau­ren­bergius affirms that the reins in gen­eral con­tribute to gen­er­a­tion, but in the dis­pu­ta­tion before cited, he explains him­self much as Gary­o­pon­tus does when he says that the reins are by nature mus­cu­lar and have nerves planted in their cav­i­ties, which con­tain the gen­er­a­tive seed. So that he attrib­utes the for­ma­tive power of the seed to the reins, and in such a man­ner as to believe that it is elab­o­rated and con­tained in them. Sen­ner­tius is of the same opin­ion, though he founds it on other rea­sons, and explains him­self more clearly, and with bet­ter evi­dence from anatom­i­cal inspec­tion than Gary­o­pon­tus, who does not seem to have been very skil­ful in anatomy. Sen­ner­tius thinks that there is not only a stim­u­lus com­mu­ni­cated from the reins to the gen­i­tals, but that the seed itself is worked in them and trans­mit­ted from them, which opin­ion Hoff­man fol­lows, and Sen­ner­tius col­lected this prin­ci­pally from hence, because the reins have a pecu­liar parenchyma, as it appears not much dif­fer­ent from the sub­stance of the heart or liver. Now Galen attrib­utes a great and pecu­liar force to a pecu­liar parenchyma in the form­ing and work­ing of the blood, which is evi­dent of all the parenchy­mas of the other vis­cera. Again, since the emul­gent vein is the great­est of all the veins that pro­ceed from the vena cava and car­ries more blood into the reins than is req­ui­site for their nutri­ment, the artery too is larger than only to serve to depu­rate the serous humour, and there­fore he thinks it prob­a­ble that nature, which makes noth­ing in vain, would not have formed those ves­sels so very large unless with a view to some par­tic­u­lar end; and this end he con­cludes to be no other than car­ry­ing the arte­r­ial blood to the reins so that, being there mixed with and altered by the venous blood, it should sup­ply mate­ri­als for form­ing the seed, which is after­wards to be trans­mit­ted to the tes­ti­cles. What con­firms this view is that accord­ing to the dif­fer­ent for­ma­tion of the reins and renal ves­sels, in which nature in other cases often sports, some men are more prone to lust than oth­ers and are far more notable per­form­ers. We have instances of this in Alber­tus and Riolanus. Each of these dis­sected the body of a male­fac­tor, and say they found three emul­gents descend­ing into the right vein, and the sper­matic veins on each side pro­ceed­ing from the emul­gent. Alber­tus rightly con­cludes that the per­son must have had a more plen­ti­ful flood of seed, and an inex­hausted and almost insa­tiable salac­ity, and of which, indeed, the fel­low com­plained a lit­tle before he was exe­cuted. Riolanus says that this man was wholly devoted to lust, and was hanged for hav­ing three wives all liv­ing at the same time. Besides these, Salmuth says that he dis­sected two men who were famous for ven­ery, the lat­ter of whom had reins of a prodi­gious size so as to equal three, nay four, of those in com­mon men. Sen­ner­tius goes on and enquires, unless this opin­ion be admit­ted, whence pro­ceeds that rank taste and odour which is dif­fused all over the body of most uncas­trated ani­mals, but most per­cep­ti­ble in the reins, espe­cially in adult bod­ies, and is not per­ceived in the reins of young and ten­der per­sons before they have con­versed with females. He adds, besides, from Orib­a­sius, that the reins are dis­or­dered by a reten­tion of the seed: that the physi­cians, in recount­ing the signs of warm reins, men­tion a propen­sity to ven­ery, lust­ful dreams, and noc­tur­nal emis­sions, and that they con­stantly deduce the qual­ity of the seed from the con­sti­tu­tion of the reins. Thus, as a ready salac­ity indi­cates warm reins, so a dis­ap­petite denotes cold ones. Lastly, he proves from Aretæus and Tral­lianus that, in gon­or­rhœa, reme­dies are applied for the diminu­tion or alter­ation of the seed to the loins near the region of the reins. In sup­port of this we may add what Pliny says — that plates of lead tied to the loins, by their cold qual­ity, obstructed the incli­na­tion to ven­ery. And he adds an instance of Cal­vas the ora­tor who, upon the sight of a woman, used to have an emis­sion, which grew upon him to a kind of dis­tem­per, and was cured by these leaden plates. Galen fre­quently states that he used these leaden plates to tame the lust­ful sal­lies and restrain the noc­tur­nal pol­lu­tions of some wrestlers; and in a pri­apism he applies a plas­ter to the loins, made of rose cakes and cold water. Cœlius, besides the leaden plates, advises the use of sponges dipped in cold water. &Aelig;tius not only uses the cold appli­ca­tions, but con­demns lying on the back for fear the loins should be over­heated and the dis­tem­per thereby increased. To these we may add Orib­a­sius and Paulus &Aelig;gineta, both of whom agree in the same point; the lat­ter for­bids even diuret­ics in gon­or­rhœa for fear of prej­u­dic­ing the reins. Nor was Avin­cenna igno­rant of it, who places the defects of coition among the signs of exten­u­ated and worn-out reins; and, among other things, he makes fre­quent cop­u­la­tion the cause of weak­ness of the reins, and advises absti­nence from it as the means of cure. Aaron, a famous physi­cian men­tioned by Rhases, knew this, for he says that if the erec­tion of the penis be lan­guid, the cause is in the liver and reins. And Aris­to­tle may be quoted to this pur­pose, for he thought that other ani­mals were not affected with gon­or­rhœa, because they did not lie upon their backs. On the con­trary, high-mettled horses, when their loins are heated by the motion of their rid­ers, run with a furi­ous heat to ven­ery. The Athen­ian matrons seem to have known this, who, when in their famous feasts they lay from their hus­bands — and, as Ovid says, Met. xi:

 

Held it a sin to fol­low Venus’ rites,

Or touch a man the space of nine long nights.-

 

made their beds of what the Latins call Agnus Cas­tus. This is a kind of shrub appro­pri­ated to extin­guis lust: for this pur­pose they strewed the leaves under their backs, with an intent of restrain­ing the gen­er­a­tive power of the seed and the appetite to ven­ery. Of this there are fre­quent instances in his­tory — in Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen, and &Aelig;lian: nor is there any other rea­son for rec­om­mend­ing the reins of ani­mals, espe­cially those of the he-goad, as provoca­tive to cop­u­la­tion, or that &Aelig;tius should pre­scribe the parts above the reins as a charm and incen­tive to lust, except that they have some anal­ogy and simil­i­tude with human reins, for which rea­son they are sup­posed to assist them and excite them to per­form the office of gen­er­a­tion. For this rea­son warm unguents, among other med­i­cines, are usu­ally pre­scribed to such per­sons who are less ready in vene­real affairs, and those to be applied not only to the priv­i­ties, but to the region of the reins; as also strong diuret­ics, as can­tharides, and the pos­ture of lying on the back, that by these meth­ods the loins may be warmed and the seed quick­ened in its motion to the tes­ti­cles, and so cold con­sti­tu­tions become fired and raised to ven­ery. From whence Rhases in his twelfth book says that when the loins are chafed with warm med­i­cine, the penis will swell and be extended in erec­tion. And Masib the Ara­bian, in the same author, says that the heat of the back assists lux­ury, and as the cool­ing of the back and sleep­ing upon cold leaves dimin­ishes that appetite, so warmth won­der­fully increases it; from all which I draw this con­se­quence, that the loins in gen­eral, and the parts they con­sist of, con­tribute chiefly to ven­ery, and prin­ci­pally their veins and arter­ies; but that the grand instru­ment of all this is the parenchyma of the reins, by which the seed first begins to be elab­o­rated, and that it is per­fected and acquires an equable con­sis­tence in its descent through the other sem­i­nal ves­sels. And yet what Nemi­sius, Isidorus, Matthæus, and Lau­ren­bergius have observed is to the pur­pose, that there is a kind of salt­ness and aer­ous mat­ter com­mu­ni­cated together with the seed from the reins to the tes­ti­cles, to pro­voke the tit­il­la­tion and fill up the dunghill, which lat­ter is the very word Papius the gram­mar­ian uses in his vocabulary.

 

I fur­ther con­clude that stripes upon the back and loins, as parts appro­pri­ated for the gen­er­at­ing of the seed, and car­ry­ing it to the gen­i­tals, warm and inflame those parts and con­tribute very much to the irri­ta­tion of lech­ery. From all which, it is no won­der that such shame­less wretches, vic­tims of a detested appetite, such as we have men­tioned, or oth­ers exhausted by too fre­quent a rep­e­ti­tion, their loins and ves­sels being drained, have sought for a rem­edy by flog­ging. For it is very prob­a­ble that the refrig­er­ated parts grow warm by such stripes and excite a heat in the sem­i­nal mat­ter, and that more par­tic­u­larly from the pain of the flogged parts, which is the rea­son that the blood and spir­its are attracted in a greater quan­tity, till the heat is com­mu­ni­cated to the organs of gen­er­a­tion and the per­verse and fren­zied appetite is sat­is­fied, and nature, though unwill­ing, is drawn beyond the stretch of her com­mon power to the com­mis­sion of such an abom­inable crime.

 

This, dear Cas­sius, is my opin­ion. But you will object that the per­sons I treat of are such as, being exhausted by a licen­tious ven­ery, made use of this rem­edy for the con­tin­u­a­tion of their ungovern­able lust and a rep­e­ti­tion of such unseemly enjoy­ment. But then you ask, since the case is so, whether a per­son who hase prac­tised law­ful love and yet per­ceives his loins and sides lan­guid (the sub­ject of this trea­tise) may not, with­out the impu­ta­tion of any crime, make use of the same method in order to dis­charge a debt, which I won’t say is due, but to please the cred­i­tor? More plainly, the per­son that I would describe is such as Vir­gil does in his Georgies:

 

Lan­guid and cold, he moves to work with pain,

And drib­bles at the lovely sport in vain;

When at the best, ’tis like a stub­ble fired,

Flashes in haste, and is in haste expired.

 

Well, friend Cas­sius, why may not the rem­edy be made use of in the cir­cum­stances sup­posed? That you have no occa­sion for it I am ready to take a thou­sand oaths. I, who am a physi­cian, and from my own pro­fes­sion either know or ought to know, and give a shrewd judg­ment that way, long since pre­sumed I was no false guesser on your side. Your young wife’s great belly is an evi­dence to be depended upon beyond all excep­tions, and to whom I wish a happy moment in due sea­son. How­ever, I won’t for­bid you com­mu­ni­cat­ing this rem­edy to oth­ers who may have occa­sion for a flogging.

 

The gates of the Muses, (that is, of all pro­fes­sors of sci­ence), ought always to be open, and espe­cially those of physi­cians; for, as Scri­bo­nius Largus in his epis­tle to Julius Cal­is­tus says, that the impu­ta­tion of a nig­gardly envy ought to be abom­i­nated by all peo­ple, espe­cially physi­cians, who, if they are not accord­ing to the intent of their pro­fes­sion full of pity and human­ity, are objects of detes­ta­tion both to God and man.

 

Thus, my dear friend, to sat­isfy your curios­ity, I have explained my opin­ion to you with a lit­tle more free­dom than ordi­nary. Do you take it all, such as it is, in good parts: love me still as your friend, and par­don my inno­cent raillery, which yet has its con­se­quences of seri­ous­ness, and so farewell.

 

Lubeck, Sept. 7, 1659.

 

J. H. MEIBOMIUS

 

HENRY MEIBOMIUS, JUN. TO THE

MOST EXCELL. THOS. BARTHOLIN

I under­stand, with a great deal of plea­sure, from Chris­tianus Paullus, the excel­lent son of the great Simon Paullus, that my let­ter in answer to yours came safe to your hands. The same per­son sig­ni­fied to me, in your name, that you designed to reprint my father’s epis­tle con­cern­ing the Use of Flog­ging in Ven­ery, and the Office of the Loins and Reins. Noth­ing could be more accept­able to me than this your inten­tion. As to the epis­tle itself, it was occa­sioned by a free jocose con­ver­sa­tion at an enter­tain­ment, and an edi­tion of it was pro­cured at Ley­den by that great per­son to whom it is inscribed. How­ever, it pleased many excel­lent per­sons all over Europe, and has been quoted by some in pub­lic prints. But there being at first only a few copies printed, to be given to friends, it began to be desired by the learned and impa­tiently sought for by the curi­ous — the sub­ject being, I don’t know why, very enter­tain­ing and allur­ing. I have often been sorry that I could not oblige my friends at their request with the favour of a book; how­ever, I was unwill­ing, on my first entrance on the stage of Fame, to incur the cen­sure of such to whom these papers, tinc­tured with a tick­ling salt, might seem to ludi­crous and lib­er­tine. How­ever, in the mean­time it hap­pened that it was reprinted, prob­a­bly at Ley­den, though I know not who was the edi­tor, which I was not dis­pleased with; but had I been informed of it, that edi­tion had come out more cor­rect. But now I am very much sat­is­fied, and give myself joy that it has pleased you, whom Europe reck­ons among her chief orna­ments, as to think it wor­thy of a new impres­sion, enlarged by addi­tions of your own. You are now in no dan­ger from the affect­edly sour, not need you fear

 

Lest rugged Cato should to you oppose

His wrin­kled lips and beastly length of nose.

 

But these mys­ter­ies can­not oth­er­wise be pre­served, nor are we writ­ing for vestals or uncul­ti­vated Sabines, but to physi­cians; how­ever, the argu­ment deserves to be exam­ined, nor do I ques­tion but you, who are a per­son of great wit and infi­nite read­ing, have cited all the pas­sages that can adorn the sub­ject; yet, since my father, after the last edi­tion of his epis­tle, has added some mar­ginal notes to his copy, I trans­mit them to you, to be inserted in their proper place for the enrich­ing of your new edi­tion. Lastly, there are some things in this let­ter which savour of ante-Harveian times, in which I would rather own the error of my excel­lent father than defend it; espe­cially since it is such a one as was not only com­mon to some learned men as well as him­self, but even to some ages too. You know that say­ing of your Cel­sus: ‘Light wits, because they have noth­ing, detract noth­ing from them­selves;’ a sin­gle con­ces­sion of error agrees with a great wit who will yet retain, for all that mis­take, many valu­able things: and why should not an error deserve par­don, which the per­son does not incur by his own obsti­nacy, but by the infe­lic­ity of the age he lives in?

 

As for what he relates in the begin­ning of the epis­tle, of the cure of dis­tem­pers by flog­ging, that depends on the author­ity of oth­ers and is beyond all excep­tions. The mod­erns, how­ever, seem to account these reme­dies, if not worse than the dis­ease, yet very ungrate­ful ones. Yet, as to the cure of mad­ness by strokes, which he quotes from Cœlius, Rhases and oth­ers, although physi­cians have not taken notice of it lately, yet I learn from Bodin that it was prac­tised quite recently in Eng­land. The pas­sage stands in the fifth book of his Com­mon­wealth: ‘Mad­ness some­times is height­ened into frenzy, which kind of frenzy grows milder by strokes and whip­ping; for a com­pany of mad­men in Lon­don, con­fined in the same house, are severely chas­tised with rods at the last quar­ter of the moon, at which time their frenzy is more pow­er­ful from the inflam­ma­tion of their brain. When I began to pity their case, I under­stood from those that looked after them that it was the most cer­tain cure of this frenzy.’ The palms of the Roman women were struck, and that was thought to facil­i­tate par­tu­ri­tion in the preg­nant and give fecun­dity to the bar­ren. The cus­tom was super­sti­tious enough, and the Luperci were the only oper­a­tors of it. They were clad in the vest­ment of Juno, or a goatskin, as Fes­tus informs us; and the Romans them­selves ridiculed it, as is plain from the sec­ond satire of Juve­nal. Some think that sleep­walk­ers ought to be soundly whipped, which method I myself know suc­ceeded in a cer­tain instance, the dis­tem­per being hap­pily car­ried off for good.

 

After these, my father cites the his­to­ries of flog­ging for the incit­ing of ven­ery, and begins to enquire into the cause of it. He first rejects the stars and cus­tom, and, if I am not mis­taken, has made it plain that the cause of it can­not be derived from these only. He next remarks that this flog­ging was only prac­tised upon the back and loins, and thinks to deduce the cause from thence. To this pur­pose he shows that the Scrip­ture, as well as all antiq­uity, unan­i­mously attribute to the loins, reins, and sides, their par­tic­u­lar offices in the gen­er­a­tion of the seed and the effect of vene­real plea­sures. And he has indeed quoted a great many pas­sages from dif­fer­ent writ­ers, and many more can be brought to the same pur­pose, espe­cially from the poets, unless the case be already evi­dent. For the same rea­son I con­clude that the loins to con­tribute much to vene­real plea­sure: but what he after­wards under­takes to prove, that the seed is first elab­o­rated by the reins, sit­u­ated in the loins, although he has a great many famous men, both before and since his time, of the same opin­ion, yet, in my opin­ion, he has not proved that point. For it is granted at present by the searchers into truth, that the blood is car­ried by the emul­gent arter­ies to the reins, and from the reins, by the emul­gent veins, into the vena cava, and from thence returns to the heart; as also that the sper­matic arter­ies received the blood from the great artery, and that the sper­matic veins bring back the same from the sem­i­nal parts, partly into the vena cava, and partly into the emul­gent vein — which motion of the blood is plainly proved by the con­struc­tion of the valves in the veins. Now, from hence it is evi­dent that noth­ing descends from the reins to the tes­ti­cles through the ves­sels. In the mean­time it remains true that warm loins con­tribute to the work of Venus, and cold ones obstruct it; and that the physi­cians rightly apply warm things to the loins for the excit­ing of lust, and col things for the sup­press­ing of it: for, as my father has rightly observed from Cagna­tus and Mon­tuus, there are larger ves­sels placed in the loins, in which, if the blood grows warm, it must nec­es­sar­ily flow warmer down through the sper­matic artery and dis­pose the sem­i­nal mat­ter, eas­ily irri­ta­ble, into a state of heat and fer­vency. Next, as to the reins, it is my opin­ion that if they are more than ordi­nar­ily heated, a greater degree of heat will be com­mu­ni­cated to the blood in its return through the emul­gent veins; and since the blood is con­tin­u­ally flow­ing to the reins and back again, a greater heat may be com­mu­ni­cated from the reins to the whole mass of blood, from whence the blood will descend warmer through the sper­matic arter­ies. From hence it may be explained why those who have hot veins are prone to ven­ery, as well as the other phe­nom­ena which my father has brought to prove his opin­ion. Per­haps, too, it may some­times hap­pen to those who have a hot state of blood and are con­se­quently more prone to lust, that the reins may grow warm by the con­tin­ual acces­sion of the blood, as is noted by physi­cians. When by an error in diet the blood is inflamed, the reins gen­er­ally suf­fer for it, because a greater quan­tity of blood is flow­ing there than to any other part: so then, lust does not depend so much upon the heat of the reins as from the com­mon cause, the heat of the blood, and from thence pro­ceeds lust and the heat of the reins. Fur­ther, I explain the mat­ter thus: By the strokes of rods, the blood, as well in the great as small ves­sels in the loins, grows warm, and then in the reins them­selves; and lastly, from thence the whole mass of blood — and there­fore it flows more hot and in a greater quan­tity through the sem­i­nal arter­ies till, by the wicked thought of these wretches, prepar­ing them­selves for a vene­real con­gress, it is turned with a greater degree to the sper­matic ves­sels, after the same man­ner a proflu­vium of the seed is accel­er­ated by a soft bed or a supine pos­ture. It is well known that peo­ple who ride horse­back are prone to ven­ery, and the same was long ago observed in the cento of prob­lems that are pub­lished under the name of Aris­to­tle. This author gives as his expla­na­tion that they are affected by the heat and agi­ta­tion in the same man­ner as in coition, which is exactly to my mean­ing; for the blood in the ves­sels grows warm by these motions of the rider, and its motion is quick­ened through the descend­ing trunk of the aorta, and so on to the sem­i­nal ves­sels. Hip­pocrates, indeed, in his book on Air, Water, and Sit­u­a­tion, seems to tes­tify the con­trary when he says that those who ride much are ren­dered too unapt for ven­ery: but that is to be under­stood of the con­tin­ual rid­ing of the Syth­i­ans, which pro­ceeds even to weari­ness and so debil­i­tates and relaxes the body and con­se­quently sup­presses the irri­ta­tion to ven­ery: but that rid­ing which we men­tion from Aris­to­tle, which only gen­tly heats the loins, is to be under­stood as mod­er­ate. I have no incli­na­tion to go on now and exam­ine dis­tinctly every point which my father has pro­duced upon this sub­ject, espe­cially since all that Sen­ner­tius has said is ably dis­cussed by High­more in his Anatomy.

 

In the mean­time, many of my father’s propo­si­tions stand upon a good foun­da­tion, only reject­ing the gen­er­at­ing power of the seed lodged in the reins. The rest of his argu­ments are very evi­dent. Some of the mod­erns may per­haps endeav­our to explain these phe­nom­ena oth­er­wise from their own hypoth­e­sis, as a cer­tain inge­nious per­son did who was firmly per­suaded that the mat­ter of the seed was made of the chyle and not of the blood; and that by strokes upon the loins the swelling alveus was heated, and then that the sub­stance descended quicker to the gen­i­tals. Rea­sons very dif­fer­ent from these might be brought by those who favor the the­ory of a ner­vous juice, which they think affords mat­ter for the seed. I per­ceive now that the obser­va­tion is true in this instance, which Grœci­nus for­merly said of all inven­tions — that most peo­ple began new works with more bold­ness than they could main­tain these that were before per­fect. How­ever, I think the opin­ion I have pro­posed of the heat of the blood in the loins depends on exper­i­ment and not hypoth­e­sis. If, excel­lent Sir, you approve of it, I shall be much more con­firmed in my opinion.

 

Helm­stadt, Aug. 19, 1669.

 

H. MEIBOMIUS

 

A SELECTION FROM OUR LIST

Ban­dello — Choice Tales.

Stra­parola — Delec­table Nights.

Firen­zuola — Tales.

Pog­gio — Face­tious Tales.

Jacobus X. — Untrod­den Fields of Anthro­pol­ogy. 2 vols.

- Eth­nol­ogy of the Sixth Sense.

- Gen­i­tal Laws.

- Dis­ci­pline in School and Cloister.

Dulaure — Pri­apic Divinites and Phal­lic Rites

Dufour — His­tory of Pros­ti­tu­tion. 6 vols.

Dev­ereux — Venus in India.

Regla — The Early Fathers and Love.

- The Early Fathers and Marriage.

Cre­bil­lion fils — The Sofa.

Petro­n­ius — The Satyricon.

Bran­tome — Lives of the Fair and Gal­lant Ladies. 2 vols.

 

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