ONAN ESCHEWED - Rick Grunder

Really quite a nice copy despite being a little soiled and bumped; text and
frontispiece(s) in generally fine condition. Two pages were printed somewhat
askew, resulting in partial loss of a running headline & page number (67), and of
the lower half of one bottom line of text (but still readable, p. 95). $225
The reader will have to decide if the author was an accomplished physician or a
polished huckster. Variant titles and editions of this little book were published
in San Francisco and New York giving the author's name as Henry J. Jordan
(brothers? pseudonyms?). Various editions in San Francisco this same year
(none shown there earlier by OCLC) offer varying paginations, although this one
is the shortest. A guide to the Museum was sometimes bound with them.
Strictly speaking, OCLC has only one entry that appears to correspond
absolutely to the copy at hand (but even that entry does not number its edition),
locating four copies (Duke University, UC-San Francisco, Cornell and University
of Rochester Medical Center).
MASTURBATION, pp. 36-51, continuing (as usual in such works) with a related
chapter on "Spermatorrhoea," pp. 51-66, followed by related "Remarks on False
Delicacy" (Chapter VII, pp. 66-72). Various cases (quoting principally from
patients' letters to the author - almost all centered around masturbation) fill
pages 88-95 and beyond. The content of these diverse, manipulative publications
seen in this cataloge is often fresh - in terms of examples and colorful stories.
Their essence and central misconceptions, however, seldom vary.
60
The frequency with which this act will be repeated in the day, is enough to
frighten the physician or physiologist as to the consequences; but the youthful