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There were two reasons why Chidley rejected Acton’s theory that the problem was mere excess. First, there was his failure to define excessive when discussing the harm of excessive intercourse (except retrospectively, after illness had ensued). Secondly there was Chidley’s own romantic belief that something as natural as intercourse could not be indulged in to excess, with its implication that there must therefore be something wrong with the method. [17] This consideration might have led him in a libertarian direction, to question the very doctrine that sensual activity was debilitating, but his prior and unshakeable conviction that all illness was caused in this manner sent him further in the other direction. There is a dreamlike quality to Chidley’s reasoning in which the ideas he has picked up from his wide reading reappear in grotesque form. Although Chidley was condemned for preaching immorality, he was actually advocating a degree of puritanical restraint even more severe than Acton and all the other jovenlandesalists who insisted that sex was permissible only for reproduction. He went further to argue that erections themselves were permissible only for reproductive purposes, and that tumescent manifestations in any other circumstances were wrong.
Having decided that erections were the root of all evil he was such a sound “Victorian” that he needed to argue that they were unattractive and unnatural as well, and accordingly asserted that the erect penis was “an ugly thing” of which “we are all ashamed” [18] and “a weakness, the same as a stiff neck or knee”. [19] It was “an inherited weakness” or lesion, arising from loss of nerve and muscle tone. That erections were also unnatural was proved by the “fact” that “babies and boys have erections”, even though they “serve no purpose with boys” and, on the contrary, “may often ruin the boy’s life”. [20] Conventional medical wisdom was that masturbation ruined a boy’s life, so Chidley was only going a little further in blaming the erection which led to the act. Indeed, these comments are remarkably close to the view of Lallemand, who deplored erections before puberty as an unhealthy sign of sensual precocity, likely to give rise to predictable bad habits. [21] Although he had not read Lallemand, Chidley imbibed his suspicion of juvenile penile restlessness through Acton, whose baleful comments on priapism and satyriasis he triumphantly quoted in his pamphlet on erection. He was also impressed by Acton’s remark that the principal cause of erection was “nervous irritation” – further evidence of the evil inherent in our mode of coition. [22]
Commentators on Chidley have claimed that his views on sensual intercourse were really an attempt to moderate male sensual aggressiveness and “phallocentrism” and thus to increase female pleasure. [23] He did appeal to some “purity feminists”, such as Rose Scott and Marion Piddington, who believed that the “double standard” on sensual jovenlandesality should be evened up by imposing the rule of extra-marital chastity on everybody, but as far as the sensual act was concerned, Chidley took a stricter line than Acton. He had stated that it should be approached cautiously by the strong and be got over with quickly – “some few minutes” only; [24] for Chidley, the only purpose of an erection was to facilitate a rapid ejaculation with a view to impregnation. Going one better than his mentors yet again, he wrote: “there is no reason given why the penis should become erect and then wait. On the contrary, when the erection has reached its full, ejaculation should ***ow on immediately”. [25] The disappointing implications of this scenario for female pleasure hardly need to be stressed. That Chidley was no libertarian is further indicated by his desire to ban alcohol, tobacco and opium, [26] and by the list of perversions he condemned in the course of defending his theory of the unnatural erection. [27] In condemning juvenile and adolescent sex, masturbation, gaysity, wet dreams and naughty pictures, Chidley was as extreme a Victorian wowser as you could hope to meet. He even advocated the use of chastity devices: Dr Andrew Davidson (a Sydney practitioner to whom he sought to explain his views) reported that he recommended “putting a wire cover over the testicles and penis in order to stop erection”. [28] As he told the court during the appeal against his committal for insanity, his aim was not to inflame lust (as the police claimed), but the opposite: “my book lays the axe to the root of all lust”. [29]
It is important to appreciate how close Chidley was to the medical mainstream, and particularly to the theories of nervous disease then current. Even the doctors who attested his insanity were forced, under questioning, to agree with many of his points. The Chief Government Medical Office (who had certified him) conceded that “sensual excess” was a reality, that it had harmful effects and “a very important bearing on the individual and society”, and that it could be a factor in the genesis of general paralysis of the insane. [30] Dr J.M. Creed agreed that intercourse could damage the nervous system because orgasm caused “a brainstorm” and “nervous shocks in high degree”; he added that “nerve disturbance consequent upon coitus might lead to heart trouble”. [31] The superintendent of the Hospital for the Insane, at Kenmore, [32] insisted that Chidley was mad, ridiculed the idea that coition caused shocks to the brain, but agreed that masturbation was a “contributory cause” of insanity, and admitted that he adopted methods to prevent it among inmates “when necessary”. [33] Dr George Thompson, a Sydney GP recently arrived from England, went so far as to agree that coition did cause nervous shocks which could lead to exhaustion in the “nervous centres”; that erections were sometimes pathological; and that cancer was caused by irritation – and therefore that violent intercourse provoking irritation in the vagina could indeed give rise to it. [34] If Chidley was mad, it was a very fine line that divided him from the medical professionals who had certified him.
Chidley’s case exemplifies the truth of the adage that there’s nothing worse than a reformed smoker/drinker/gambler etc. After a lifetime of exuberant indulgence in sex, alcohol and meat (interrupted, it is true, by spasms of guilt) he reached fifty and suddenly decided it had all been a mistake. He then developed an elaborate system of self-regulation aimed at eliminating these evils from his life, and he turned to vegetarianism, temperance and chastity – much to the bewilderment and displeasure of his de facto wife, Ada, who had enjoyed his studly qualities. [35] So far it was a personal theory. But after Ada’s death (from kidney failure arising from alcoholism, according to the hospital, though Chidley blamed their sex life) he began to manifest a syndrome identified by Alan Hunt in Governing jovenlandesals: that those who seek jovenlandesal regulation of themselves soon want to reform everybody else. [36] He thrashed his adoptive son (Ada’s son Donald, then a boy of about twelve) for masturbating and scolded him harshly even for getting erections. [37] His subsequent career as pamphleteer and public speaker was the result of such an obsession, and his treatment of children under his care offers a disturbing glimpse of how he would have liked to order other people’s lives. All Victorian doctors condemned sensual excess, but Chidley went one further to blame the ills of humankind on penile tumescence and to assert that the answer to the world’s problems lay in its elimination from daily life. In this he was more ambitious than even Big Brother and the Anti-Sex League in Nineteen eighty-four, which aimed merely to abolish the orgasm. Just before he died Chidley wrote that he had endured an unhappy life, but that he knew that all his misery came “from that ‘erection’ in boys and men”. Perhaps he showed greater insight when he added: “Sometimes I think books have been the curse of my life.” [38] Donald might well have thought that they had been the curse of his life.
Quackery and orthodoxy
It is perhaps surprising that Chidley did not cotton on to the strengthening identification of the foreskin as the major risk factor for masturbation, spermatorrhoea, and other sensual problems. As in Britain and the US, the phobia against masturbation was the main driving force behind the introduction of widespread circumcision in Australia at end of the nineteenth century. David Walker has examined the antiestéticars surrounding seminal loss and their connection with conceptions of manhood and national development in three important articles [39], but there are several areas in which his studies need to be extended. As Walker points out, nineteenth century medical orthodoxy held that any seminal loss weakened the system, but that masturbation was especially dangerous, partly because it was so easy to do and partly because it was indulged in mainly by the young, who needed all their energies for proper growth and development. [40] He did not, however, pick up the debate over the role of the shock of orgasm, and the whole question of nervous irritation, in this process, and was thus not alert to why Victorian doctors were so keen to target the foreskin. In concentrating on irregular medical practitioners who offered various quack cures for seminal loss and other “private diseases”, moreover, Walker leaves the impression that concern with masturbation was a fringe preoccupation and that orthodox practitioners (those trained in medical schools and usually members of the British Medical Association) were less worried by the problem. This is far from the truth: the danger of masturbation was an unquestioned axiom of the regular medical profession, and the quacks were only trying to take advantage of the antiestéticars already generated by its own advice and propaganda. Nor is it possible to draw a hard and fast line between the regular doctors and the quacks; the former exhibited plenty of evidence of ignorant faddism and eccentricity, while the latter frequently offered more humane and less damaging treatments. Ineffective they might have been, but when you are dealing with imaginary diseases it is to the advantage of the patient if the cure is not too heroic. I shall deal with each of these points in turn.
The views of the quacks were little different from those of the mainstream medical profession, though they did tend to be cast in more lurid language. Two of Sydney’s most prominent specialists in the “nervous and private diseases” of males, Drs Freeman and Wallace, referred to masturbation as a “pernicious habit” which caused a whole brood of diseases, a “disgusting subject”, a practice alarmingly widespread among the young, and a problem which must be overcome; their own cures (not detailed in the publicity) were always efficacious in this respect. [41] Even more colourful language was employed by another practitioner, Dr W.B. Towle, who mixed jovenlandesal and scientific condemnation in a manner typical of the period:
The general effects of seminal weakness, nocturnal and diurnal emissions, impotence and sterility, caused by self-abuse in early life, or excessive indulgence in later years, if not relieved by appropriate and thorough treatment, are most deplorable. This malady is one of the most widespread and destructive experienced by man. Few, except physicians, have any conception of the prevalence of self-abuse, or of its disastrous effects on both mind and ****** This habit, according to the experience of the most renowned medical men, degrades man, poisons the happiness of his best days and ravages society. … Many maniacs owe their loss of reason to no other cause. In the tabulated reports of every lunatic asylum are a great number of cases in which the cause of insanity is set down as “masturbation”. [42]
Given their generally more hellish scenarios, you might think that the quacks would be more enthusiastic about the heroic approach to male sensual problems, and masturbation specifically, than the regular doctors. In fact, the reverse is true: it was the mainstream professionals who favoured modern scientific methods of treatment, such as mechanical restraint, infibulation of the foreskin, cauterisation of the urethra and circumcision. The remedies proposed by the quacks were altogether gentler and less punitive. Freeman and Wallace did not recommend circumcision for any genital complaint and discouraged it even in cases of phimosis; as they reassured nervous clients: “Slitting the foreskin or circumcision is frequently adopted by some surgeons, but we never resort to such measures unless ... absolutely necessary”. [43] They made their own attack on quacks who offered fake cures, especially cauterisation of the urethra with caustic substances such as silver nitrate, a treatment recommended by Acton and widely practised by orthodox professionals. [44] Freeman and Wallace were vague about their own methods, but not Dr Towle: he specialised in electro-therapy, offering a range of electrical appliances designed to cure female complaints, liver and kidney problems, joint disease, nervous debility and impotence. The “Hercules Life Renewer” could even treat self-abuse successfully, though in cases where spermatorrhoea was also present, supplementary remedies would be required. [45] There is not a word here about surgical intervention. Indeed, if published testimonials from successfully treated patients may be believed, there is evidence that some men resorted to quacks precisely to avoid the surgical remedies proposed by regular physicians. Towle quotes the example of a young man suffering from paraphimosis:
A surgeon had told him he would have to undergo an operation; that the prepuce would have to be cut through. Shrinking from this prospect he decided to consult me. I administered at one some medicine, the effect of which was to relax the constricted muscles ... [and] the patient awoke to find himself quite well. He wrote saying: “I am doubly grateful to you for having not only cured me so easily, but for having saved me from having to undergo a surgical operation, which would have been very painful, and would have left its mark upon me all my days”. [46]
Given this sort of resistance to the operation, it is not surprising that the circumcision lobby learned to target its propaganda at parents rather than the subjects of the procedure. As David Gollaher has commented, the benefits of circumcision were to be enjoyed only by those who were too young to object.
For all the embarrassment they caused the regulars, it is thus not so easy to draw a firm line between the quacks and the medical profession proper. The practitioner who diagnosed a case of tinnitus as stemming from masturbation and who treated it by means of electric shocks and a long course of urethral dilation was not a quack, but Dr W.F. Quaife BA, MB etc, who described his cure in the journal of the Australian branch of the British Medical Association. [47] Indeed, the campaign against quackery was part of a wider effort on the part of doctors to establish their own professional standing and assert a monopoly over the management of bodily (and some mental) ********s.
The mainstream doctors had been vying with the irregular practitioners since at least the 1860s, and one of the main issues on which the struggle was fought was their competence to provide better treatment for “nervous and private diseases”. Acton had taken numerous swipes at the quacks, and another significant writer on spermatorrhoea, F.B. Courtenay, had fired a broadside called Revelations of quacks and quackery (1860s) in which he emerged as a crusader against the irregulars, and particularly against their claims to cure spermatorrhoeic and related diseases. In his own work on that subject he expressed the usual views on masturbation but was fairly relaxed about involuntary nocturnal emissions and critical of the cauterisation treatment advocated by Acton and others. He attacked the quacks and deplored the reluctance of the medical profession to take spermatorrhoea seriously, thus driving men into their hands. [48] He was one of the influential English writers whose ideas James Beaney had sought to popularise in Australia back in the 1870s.
Beaney’s treatise on Spermatorrhoea was explicitly part of a campaign to wrest the treatment of these diseases away from the quacks and vest it with qualified doctors; as he writes in the Preface, it was “designed to lead those who are afflicted by them to abandon the pretentious quacks” and turn to “legitimate and honourable practitioners” like himself. [49] Like Courtenay, he was critical of his profession for its “culpable neglect of one of the most important and serious … diseases to which mankind is subject”, thereby driving “a large section of the community … into the hands of the vilest imposters”. By refusing to take the disease seriously and treat it like any other medical complaint, the profession was in fact responsible for sending “thousands of wretched sufferers … into imbecility and the madhouse and even the grave”. Rejecting the prudish and old fashioned view that medical science was too delicate to be concerned with the genitals, Beaney asserts its claim to management of the whole body: “Are not the ********s of the surgeon … to embrace all the maladies to which the body is liable?”, including those afflicting the genitals. His audience here is twofold: he wants to convince the public that victims of spermatorrhoea should seek the help of professionals like him, not patronise the irregulars; but he also wants to persuade his conservative colleagues that they should accept spermatorrhoea as a real and serious disease which demanded their professional attention. Quoting from Copland’s Dictionary of practical medicine and other English authorities, Beaney regretted that too few doctors took the problem seriously, thus relinquishing it to the “unqualified empiric”, but he was pleased to note that this state of affairs was changing, and that doctors were making amends for their neglect. The nub of the case was that spermatorrhoea was too grave and complex a disease to be treated by anybody except the experts:
These several phases of spermatorrhoea require special treatment and suggest the ***y of trusting their management to the pretentious charlatans and ignorant quacks who parade their nostrums in the daily journals. The disorder … is too serious in its character and consequences to be carelessly dealt with. … the question … calls forth the highest faculties of the surgeon or physician, and taxes the powers of his art often to their limit (1870, p. 103).
Yet the sad fact is that there was very little that even the most conscientious physicians could do about these diseases that would distinguish them sharply from the quacks they so bitterly despised. Their treatments for various forms of spermatorrhoea consisted largely of bathing, exercise, diets and “medicines” like potassium, phosphorous and strychnine; their rivals offered much the same regimen, including the application of electricity. Beaney derided them for making use of an “Electro-Galvanic Vital restorer”, apparently forgetting that he himself was an exponent of galvanism and Faradization. [50] There was not much in any of this to grab the attention of the public and persuade it to abandon the irregulars; something dramatic was needed, something that only the medical profession proper could offer, some sort of magic bullet.
The years 1881–1914 were a crucial period in the emergence of the modern medical profession in Australia. A five-year degree had been introduced at Melbourne University in the 1860s, and Sydney ***owed suit in 1883; the New South Wales branch of the British Medical Association was established in 1881. The emergence of the profession was largely a process of differentiation; as Milton Lewis and Roy Macleod have shown, doctors were struggling on two fronts: against chemists, druggists and “quacks” for control over health care; and against the friendly societies over conditions of work and fees. [51] Doctors had sought since the 1860s to get legislation which would define and secure their position. Their efforts were opposed as an attempt to gain sectional privilege and knocked back several times, but in 1900 the NSW parliament passed the Medical Practitioners Act, which made it an offence for anybody without recognised qualifications to use a medical title and empowered the Medical Board to debar practitioners on a range of grounds. This victory recognised the new prestige of scientific medicine: as Lewis and Macleod comment, “the orthodox practitioners finally won legislative endorsement because they had established a cultural authority superior to that accorded ‘alternative’ practitioners”, [52] though it might be more precise to say that this legislative sanction created the very categories of “orthodox” and “alternative”: before then it had been pretty much a free-for-all. Apart from beating the quacks in the lobbying game, however, it is hard to see what medical achievements underlay the doctors’ triumph, though the promise of the new germ theory of disease may have been part of it: in 1899 the Sydney Morning Herald looked forward to the conquest of cancer and even gout. [53] As Herbert jovenlandesan’s memoirs make clear, however, the jovenlandesal and even confessional role of the doctor increased along with the growth of his scientific status, [54] and the new scientific spirit did not lead to any immediate questioning of the links which had been drawn between masturbation, immorality and disease.
There were two reasons why Chidley rejected Acton’s theory that the problem was mere excess. First, there was his failure to define excessive when discussing the harm of excessive intercourse (except retrospectively, after illness had ensued). Secondly there was Chidley’s own romantic belief that something as natural as intercourse could not be indulged in to excess, with its implication that there must therefore be something wrong with the method. [17] This consideration might have led him in a libertarian direction, to question the very doctrine that sensual activity was debilitating, but his prior and unshakeable conviction that all illness was caused in this manner sent him further in the other direction. There is a dreamlike quality to Chidley’s reasoning in which the ideas he has picked up from his wide reading reappear in grotesque form. Although Chidley was condemned for preaching immorality, he was actually advocating a degree of puritanical restraint even more severe than Acton and all the other jovenlandesalists who insisted that sex was permissible only for reproduction. He went further to argue that erections themselves were permissible only for reproductive purposes, and that tumescent manifestations in any other circumstances were wrong.
Having decided that erections were the root of all evil he was such a sound “Victorian” that he needed to argue that they were unattractive and unnatural as well, and accordingly asserted that the erect penis was “an ugly thing” of which “we are all ashamed” [18] and “a weakness, the same as a stiff neck or knee”. [19] It was “an inherited weakness” or lesion, arising from loss of nerve and muscle tone. That erections were also unnatural was proved by the “fact” that “babies and boys have erections”, even though they “serve no purpose with boys” and, on the contrary, “may often ruin the boy’s life”. [20] Conventional medical wisdom was that masturbation ruined a boy’s life, so Chidley was only going a little further in blaming the erection which led to the act. Indeed, these comments are remarkably close to the view of Lallemand, who deplored erections before puberty as an unhealthy sign of sensual precocity, likely to give rise to predictable bad habits. [21] Although he had not read Lallemand, Chidley imbibed his suspicion of juvenile penile restlessness through Acton, whose baleful comments on priapism and satyriasis he triumphantly quoted in his pamphlet on erection. He was also impressed by Acton’s remark that the principal cause of erection was “nervous irritation” – further evidence of the evil inherent in our mode of coition. [22]
Commentators on Chidley have claimed that his views on sensual intercourse were really an attempt to moderate male sensual aggressiveness and “phallocentrism” and thus to increase female pleasure. [23] He did appeal to some “purity feminists”, such as Rose Scott and Marion Piddington, who believed that the “double standard” on sensual jovenlandesality should be evened up by imposing the rule of extra-marital chastity on everybody, but as far as the sensual act was concerned, Chidley took a stricter line than Acton. He had stated that it should be approached cautiously by the strong and be got over with quickly – “some few minutes” only; [24] for Chidley, the only purpose of an erection was to facilitate a rapid ejaculation with a view to impregnation. Going one better than his mentors yet again, he wrote: “there is no reason given why the penis should become erect and then wait. On the contrary, when the erection has reached its full, ejaculation should ***ow on immediately”. [25] The disappointing implications of this scenario for female pleasure hardly need to be stressed. That Chidley was no libertarian is further indicated by his desire to ban alcohol, tobacco and opium, [26] and by the list of perversions he condemned in the course of defending his theory of the unnatural erection. [27] In condemning juvenile and adolescent sex, masturbation, gaysity, wet dreams and naughty pictures, Chidley was as extreme a Victorian wowser as you could hope to meet. He even advocated the use of chastity devices: Dr Andrew Davidson (a Sydney practitioner to whom he sought to explain his views) reported that he recommended “putting a wire cover over the testicles and penis in order to stop erection”. [28] As he told the court during the appeal against his committal for insanity, his aim was not to inflame lust (as the police claimed), but the opposite: “my book lays the axe to the root of all lust”. [29]
It is important to appreciate how close Chidley was to the medical mainstream, and particularly to the theories of nervous disease then current. Even the doctors who attested his insanity were forced, under questioning, to agree with many of his points. The Chief Government Medical Office (who had certified him) conceded that “sensual excess” was a reality, that it had harmful effects and “a very important bearing on the individual and society”, and that it could be a factor in the genesis of general paralysis of the insane. [30] Dr J.M. Creed agreed that intercourse could damage the nervous system because orgasm caused “a brainstorm” and “nervous shocks in high degree”; he added that “nerve disturbance consequent upon coitus might lead to heart trouble”. [31] The superintendent of the Hospital for the Insane, at Kenmore, [32] insisted that Chidley was mad, ridiculed the idea that coition caused shocks to the brain, but agreed that masturbation was a “contributory cause” of insanity, and admitted that he adopted methods to prevent it among inmates “when necessary”. [33] Dr George Thompson, a Sydney GP recently arrived from England, went so far as to agree that coition did cause nervous shocks which could lead to exhaustion in the “nervous centres”; that erections were sometimes pathological; and that cancer was caused by irritation – and therefore that violent intercourse provoking irritation in the vagina could indeed give rise to it. [34] If Chidley was mad, it was a very fine line that divided him from the medical professionals who had certified him.
Chidley’s case exemplifies the truth of the adage that there’s nothing worse than a reformed smoker/drinker/gambler etc. After a lifetime of exuberant indulgence in sex, alcohol and meat (interrupted, it is true, by spasms of guilt) he reached fifty and suddenly decided it had all been a mistake. He then developed an elaborate system of self-regulation aimed at eliminating these evils from his life, and he turned to vegetarianism, temperance and chastity – much to the bewilderment and displeasure of his de facto wife, Ada, who had enjoyed his studly qualities. [35] So far it was a personal theory. But after Ada’s death (from kidney failure arising from alcoholism, according to the hospital, though Chidley blamed their sex life) he began to manifest a syndrome identified by Alan Hunt in Governing jovenlandesals: that those who seek jovenlandesal regulation of themselves soon want to reform everybody else. [36] He thrashed his adoptive son (Ada’s son Donald, then a boy of about twelve) for masturbating and scolded him harshly even for getting erections. [37] His subsequent career as pamphleteer and public speaker was the result of such an obsession, and his treatment of children under his care offers a disturbing glimpse of how he would have liked to order other people’s lives. All Victorian doctors condemned sensual excess, but Chidley went one further to blame the ills of humankind on penile tumescence and to assert that the answer to the world’s problems lay in its elimination from daily life. In this he was more ambitious than even Big Brother and the Anti-Sex League in Nineteen eighty-four, which aimed merely to abolish the orgasm. Just before he died Chidley wrote that he had endured an unhappy life, but that he knew that all his misery came “from that ‘erection’ in boys and men”. Perhaps he showed greater insight when he added: “Sometimes I think books have been the curse of my life.” [38] Donald might well have thought that they had been the curse of his life.
Quackery and orthodoxy
It is perhaps surprising that Chidley did not cotton on to the strengthening identification of the foreskin as the major risk factor for masturbation, spermatorrhoea, and other sensual problems. As in Britain and the US, the phobia against masturbation was the main driving force behind the introduction of widespread circumcision in Australia at end of the nineteenth century. David Walker has examined the antiestéticars surrounding seminal loss and their connection with conceptions of manhood and national development in three important articles [39], but there are several areas in which his studies need to be extended. As Walker points out, nineteenth century medical orthodoxy held that any seminal loss weakened the system, but that masturbation was especially dangerous, partly because it was so easy to do and partly because it was indulged in mainly by the young, who needed all their energies for proper growth and development. [40] He did not, however, pick up the debate over the role of the shock of orgasm, and the whole question of nervous irritation, in this process, and was thus not alert to why Victorian doctors were so keen to target the foreskin. In concentrating on irregular medical practitioners who offered various quack cures for seminal loss and other “private diseases”, moreover, Walker leaves the impression that concern with masturbation was a fringe preoccupation and that orthodox practitioners (those trained in medical schools and usually members of the British Medical Association) were less worried by the problem. This is far from the truth: the danger of masturbation was an unquestioned axiom of the regular medical profession, and the quacks were only trying to take advantage of the antiestéticars already generated by its own advice and propaganda. Nor is it possible to draw a hard and fast line between the regular doctors and the quacks; the former exhibited plenty of evidence of ignorant faddism and eccentricity, while the latter frequently offered more humane and less damaging treatments. Ineffective they might have been, but when you are dealing with imaginary diseases it is to the advantage of the patient if the cure is not too heroic. I shall deal with each of these points in turn.
The views of the quacks were little different from those of the mainstream medical profession, though they did tend to be cast in more lurid language. Two of Sydney’s most prominent specialists in the “nervous and private diseases” of males, Drs Freeman and Wallace, referred to masturbation as a “pernicious habit” which caused a whole brood of diseases, a “disgusting subject”, a practice alarmingly widespread among the young, and a problem which must be overcome; their own cures (not detailed in the publicity) were always efficacious in this respect. [41] Even more colourful language was employed by another practitioner, Dr W.B. Towle, who mixed jovenlandesal and scientific condemnation in a manner typical of the period:
The general effects of seminal weakness, nocturnal and diurnal emissions, impotence and sterility, caused by self-abuse in early life, or excessive indulgence in later years, if not relieved by appropriate and thorough treatment, are most deplorable. This malady is one of the most widespread and destructive experienced by man. Few, except physicians, have any conception of the prevalence of self-abuse, or of its disastrous effects on both mind and ****** This habit, according to the experience of the most renowned medical men, degrades man, poisons the happiness of his best days and ravages society. … Many maniacs owe their loss of reason to no other cause. In the tabulated reports of every lunatic asylum are a great number of cases in which the cause of insanity is set down as “masturbation”. [42]
Given their generally more hellish scenarios, you might think that the quacks would be more enthusiastic about the heroic approach to male sensual problems, and masturbation specifically, than the regular doctors. In fact, the reverse is true: it was the mainstream professionals who favoured modern scientific methods of treatment, such as mechanical restraint, infibulation of the foreskin, cauterisation of the urethra and circumcision. The remedies proposed by the quacks were altogether gentler and less punitive. Freeman and Wallace did not recommend circumcision for any genital complaint and discouraged it even in cases of phimosis; as they reassured nervous clients: “Slitting the foreskin or circumcision is frequently adopted by some surgeons, but we never resort to such measures unless ... absolutely necessary”. [43] They made their own attack on quacks who offered fake cures, especially cauterisation of the urethra with caustic substances such as silver nitrate, a treatment recommended by Acton and widely practised by orthodox professionals. [44] Freeman and Wallace were vague about their own methods, but not Dr Towle: he specialised in electro-therapy, offering a range of electrical appliances designed to cure female complaints, liver and kidney problems, joint disease, nervous debility and impotence. The “Hercules Life Renewer” could even treat self-abuse successfully, though in cases where spermatorrhoea was also present, supplementary remedies would be required. [45] There is not a word here about surgical intervention. Indeed, if published testimonials from successfully treated patients may be believed, there is evidence that some men resorted to quacks precisely to avoid the surgical remedies proposed by regular physicians. Towle quotes the example of a young man suffering from paraphimosis:
A surgeon had told him he would have to undergo an operation; that the prepuce would have to be cut through. Shrinking from this prospect he decided to consult me. I administered at one some medicine, the effect of which was to relax the constricted muscles ... [and] the patient awoke to find himself quite well. He wrote saying: “I am doubly grateful to you for having not only cured me so easily, but for having saved me from having to undergo a surgical operation, which would have been very painful, and would have left its mark upon me all my days”. [46]
Given this sort of resistance to the operation, it is not surprising that the circumcision lobby learned to target its propaganda at parents rather than the subjects of the procedure. As David Gollaher has commented, the benefits of circumcision were to be enjoyed only by those who were too young to object.
For all the embarrassment they caused the regulars, it is thus not so easy to draw a firm line between the quacks and the medical profession proper. The practitioner who diagnosed a case of tinnitus as stemming from masturbation and who treated it by means of electric shocks and a long course of urethral dilation was not a quack, but Dr W.F. Quaife BA, MB etc, who described his cure in the journal of the Australian branch of the British Medical Association. [47] Indeed, the campaign against quackery was part of a wider effort on the part of doctors to establish their own professional standing and assert a monopoly over the management of bodily (and some mental) ********s.
The mainstream doctors had been vying with the irregular practitioners since at least the 1860s, and one of the main issues on which the struggle was fought was their competence to provide better treatment for “nervous and private diseases”. Acton had taken numerous swipes at the quacks, and another significant writer on spermatorrhoea, F.B. Courtenay, had fired a broadside called Revelations of quacks and quackery (1860s) in which he emerged as a crusader against the irregulars, and particularly against their claims to cure spermatorrhoeic and related diseases. In his own work on that subject he expressed the usual views on masturbation but was fairly relaxed about involuntary nocturnal emissions and critical of the cauterisation treatment advocated by Acton and others. He attacked the quacks and deplored the reluctance of the medical profession to take spermatorrhoea seriously, thus driving men into their hands. [48] He was one of the influential English writers whose ideas James Beaney had sought to popularise in Australia back in the 1870s.
Beaney’s treatise on Spermatorrhoea was explicitly part of a campaign to wrest the treatment of these diseases away from the quacks and vest it with qualified doctors; as he writes in the Preface, it was “designed to lead those who are afflicted by them to abandon the pretentious quacks” and turn to “legitimate and honourable practitioners” like himself. [49] Like Courtenay, he was critical of his profession for its “culpable neglect of one of the most important and serious … diseases to which mankind is subject”, thereby driving “a large section of the community … into the hands of the vilest imposters”. By refusing to take the disease seriously and treat it like any other medical complaint, the profession was in fact responsible for sending “thousands of wretched sufferers … into imbecility and the madhouse and even the grave”. Rejecting the prudish and old fashioned view that medical science was too delicate to be concerned with the genitals, Beaney asserts its claim to management of the whole body: “Are not the ********s of the surgeon … to embrace all the maladies to which the body is liable?”, including those afflicting the genitals. His audience here is twofold: he wants to convince the public that victims of spermatorrhoea should seek the help of professionals like him, not patronise the irregulars; but he also wants to persuade his conservative colleagues that they should accept spermatorrhoea as a real and serious disease which demanded their professional attention. Quoting from Copland’s Dictionary of practical medicine and other English authorities, Beaney regretted that too few doctors took the problem seriously, thus relinquishing it to the “unqualified empiric”, but he was pleased to note that this state of affairs was changing, and that doctors were making amends for their neglect. The nub of the case was that spermatorrhoea was too grave and complex a disease to be treated by anybody except the experts:
These several phases of spermatorrhoea require special treatment and suggest the ***y of trusting their management to the pretentious charlatans and ignorant quacks who parade their nostrums in the daily journals. The disorder … is too serious in its character and consequences to be carelessly dealt with. … the question … calls forth the highest faculties of the surgeon or physician, and taxes the powers of his art often to their limit (1870, p. 103).
Yet the sad fact is that there was very little that even the most conscientious physicians could do about these diseases that would distinguish them sharply from the quacks they so bitterly despised. Their treatments for various forms of spermatorrhoea consisted largely of bathing, exercise, diets and “medicines” like potassium, phosphorous and strychnine; their rivals offered much the same regimen, including the application of electricity. Beaney derided them for making use of an “Electro-Galvanic Vital restorer”, apparently forgetting that he himself was an exponent of galvanism and Faradization. [50] There was not much in any of this to grab the attention of the public and persuade it to abandon the irregulars; something dramatic was needed, something that only the medical profession proper could offer, some sort of magic bullet.
The years 1881–1914 were a crucial period in the emergence of the modern medical profession in Australia. A five-year degree had been introduced at Melbourne University in the 1860s, and Sydney ***owed suit in 1883; the New South Wales branch of the British Medical Association was established in 1881. The emergence of the profession was largely a process of differentiation; as Milton Lewis and Roy Macleod have shown, doctors were struggling on two fronts: against chemists, druggists and “quacks” for control over health care; and against the friendly societies over conditions of work and fees. [51] Doctors had sought since the 1860s to get legislation which would define and secure their position. Their efforts were opposed as an attempt to gain sectional privilege and knocked back several times, but in 1900 the NSW parliament passed the Medical Practitioners Act, which made it an offence for anybody without recognised qualifications to use a medical title and empowered the Medical Board to debar practitioners on a range of grounds. This victory recognised the new prestige of scientific medicine: as Lewis and Macleod comment, “the orthodox practitioners finally won legislative endorsement because they had established a cultural authority superior to that accorded ‘alternative’ practitioners”, [52] though it might be more precise to say that this legislative sanction created the very categories of “orthodox” and “alternative”: before then it had been pretty much a free-for-all. Apart from beating the quacks in the lobbying game, however, it is hard to see what medical achievements underlay the doctors’ triumph, though the promise of the new germ theory of disease may have been part of it: in 1899 the Sydney Morning Herald looked forward to the conquest of cancer and even gout. [53] As Herbert jovenlandesan’s memoirs make clear, however, the jovenlandesal and even confessional role of the doctor increased along with the growth of his scientific status, [54] and the new scientific spirit did not lead to any immediate questioning of the links which had been drawn between masturbation, immorality and disease.
