ONAN ESCHEWED - Rick Grunder

hear and heed a "grandpa's warning and advice." A covered, slimy, filthy,
poisoning slough underlies all your paths, more vile than can be described,
destructive to all your rosy cheeks, your happy hours, your life-long joys and
powers, from whose fatal blight you can never free yourselves. It is
Masturbation, or self-pollution, and consists in handling your private parts while
indulging vulgar sexual feelings, by imagining impure pleasures with your
opposite sex. It is taught by bad boys and girls, and worse men and women,
often by nurses, learned the most in day and boarding schools, academies and
colleges; and practised almost universally from five years old up.
'I know personally that most of the students of Miami College practised it while I
was there." —A Judge Alumni, at Antioch, O[hio]., in 1861. "Few escape it till
puberty. Schools mainly propagate it." —An English Medical Author. "My son of
four learned it his first day at school" —A Kingston Mother[.] "Self-abuse is killing
your son by causing consumption." —P. "No, sir. I have watched him with
maternal linx-eyes from boyhood without detecting one sign of it."—His Mother.
"How is this, young man?"—P. "I have practised it from boyhood, how my
brother died of it, and sister perpetrates it now." "This sickly young woman, these
two lads, and even this young ten-year old, are ruining themselves by
masturbation."—P. [etc., p. 172]
34 GARDNER, Augustus K[insley]. (1821-76). CONJUGAL SINS AGAINST THE
LAWS OF LIFE AND HEALTH, And Their Effects Upon the Father, Mother, and
Child. By Augustus K. Gardner, A.M., M.D., Late Professor of Diseases of Females and
Clinical Midwifery in the New York Medical College. Twentieth Thousand. Revised
Edition, with a new Preface. New York: G. J. Moulton, Publisher, 1874 [c. 1874 by
Augustus K Gardner].
18½ cm. [1 (half-title; ads)]f.; 240, [4 (ads)] pp. Introduction dated New York,
January 1, 1870. Orig. rust-color cloth, gilt-lettered spine. Medium wear to
binding; internally fine, including dark brown clay-based endpapers. $45
Revised edition. OCLC shows the first edition published in 1870, followed by
editions printed in 1874, 1875 and perhaps later, including eight locations for the
edition offered here (including URMC).
Chapter V, "PERSONAL POLLUTION," pp. 69-75. This is a rather vague treatment
by a gynecologist (compare to item 109), affecting extreme delicacy and shock
regarding the topic. Gardner explains up front that his purpose is to support
opinions "enunciated by the Rev. Bishop Coxe of Western N.Y. . . . and
promulgated by the resolutions of the Presbyterian Assembly held in this city
last spring," etc., p. 7. He approaches masturbation "with great hesitation," he
says, but he is "rather emboldened to point out the secret cause of much that is
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