ONAN ESCHEWED - Rick Grunder

perverting the energies and demoralizing the minds of many of our fairest and
best, by recognizing the immense good that has been done to the male youth of
this country by the kind and forcible statements of Rev. Dr. Todd in his Students'
Manual." (p. 69).
Gardner believes that ". . . thousands now live to thank this conscientious teacher
for the first information they received of the ills arising from a habit more
pernicious to the intellectual man . . . than any other habit to which he is usually
addicted." (p. 70. Regarding Todd's manual, see item 106 in this catalog.) He
devotes much of this chapter to women, and considers their modern
environment to be too unwholesome, too sequestered. "A veritable plague is today
scourging the society of France, spreading ruin in its families. It is, to use a
consecrated expression, 'the unbridled luxury of women.' " (p. 73)
What emerges in this chapter - and in other, much more direct works analyzed in
this catalog - is a nineteenth-century notion that masturbation (and "the
ingenious stratagems of the debauch," p. 75) are somehow greater than in earlier
modern times, and that it is in large measure promulgated from person to
person, reminding one of similarly skewed ideas held by many people regarding
homosexuality in our own era.
35 GREENE, C[ordelia]. A[gnes]. BUILD WELL; The Basis of Individual, Home, and
National Elevation. Plain Truths Relating to the Obligations of Marriage and
Parentage[.] By C. A. Greene, M.D. Abusus no tollit usum . . . Boston: D. Lothrop
and Company, [c. 1885].
18½ cm. ix pp.; [1]f.; 233 pp. Glossary, pp. 227-33. Orig. brown cloth decorated
in black, with simple but ornamental gilt lettering on spine and front board.
Very good; light soil. $75
Only year of publication, according to OCLC. The OCLC records are confusing,
but suggest three different pagination variants, and two different wordings for
the Lothrop firm in the imprint. Only the National Library of Medicine describes
the imprint to read as it appears in this volume (above), yet they give the wrong
pagination and incorrect author there.
By a woman doctor who studied medicine with her father. Childhood
MASTURBATION, pp. 146-53, "MECHANICAL IRRITATION AS THE CAUSE OF
PERVERSION." The naiveté of that era (on so many levels, exhibited in
Dr. Greene's final example) must be sufficiently arresting to modern readers to
warrant full transcription below . . .
The following touching story, told me by a personal friend, the trusted
physician of the family where the circumstances occurred, will illustrate the
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