ONAN ESCHEWED - Rick Grunder

15½ cm. 252 pp. Brown ribbed grain cloth; title gilt-stamped horizontally across
front board in large letters. Medium wear only, but front inner hinge nearly
broken and a couple signatures nearly sprung. Still, interesting in appearance,
and certainly early enough for an American work on such topics. $150
OCLC shows editions in 1842, '43, '45, '46, and '50 (same publishers; the last by
"Broaders" in Albany). Originally published in French and German in 1835
(Paris, Brussels, Leipzig), then in Dutch (Utrecht, 1836), and in English by the
Boston firm above in 1838, '39, and '41 under title, A Treatise on the Diseases
Produced by Onanism, Masturbation, Self-Pollution, and Other Excesses . . . Translated
from the French with Many Additions . . . – OCLC, which also locates one copy of a
New York version (T. W. Strong, 1842; 252 pp.) under title, Solitary Vices, Their
Causes and Consequences . . . at the American Antiquarian Society. Curiously,
despite all these versions and editions, not a single copy of any appears currently
for sale on a major Internet book finding site (October 5, 2010).
Heavy emphasis throughout on MASTURBATION by both sexes. As one might
hope, such an author was more scholarly, refined and elegant than the bulk of
the writers observed in the present collection. Yet the medical man must address
specifics, and the following cases seem exceptional (however expected) in a
context of generally prudish nineteenth-century literature. An example perhaps
too extreme and shocking to include here (pp. 127-29, about "A shepherd of
Languedoc, Gabriel Ballien" - but involving no sheep) is accompanied by many
other curious accounts, such as . . .
. . . a young man [who] had passed his penis into a copper ring: this, however,
was fortunately divided with a pair of strong scissors. Another used a rough
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