ONAN ESCHEWED - Rick Grunder

80 ONANIA: Or, the HEINOUS SIN of
Self=Pollution, and All its FRIGHTFUL
CONSEQUENCES (in Both Sexes)
CONSIDERED: With Spiritual and
Physical ADVICE to those who have
already injured themselves by this
abominable Practice. The Nineteenth
Edition, as also the Tenth Edition of the
SUPPLEMENT to it, both of them
Revised and Enlarged, and now Printed
together in One Volume. . . . London:
Printed for, and Sold by C. Corbett
. . . and T. Cooke, 1759.
18 cm. viii, 336 pp. Internally, a very
good and clean copy, collated
complete. BINDING: Contemporary
calf. Joints broken with front board
all but detached; spine caps gone;
could certainly be restored to look as
nice as the text inside. $1,500
T
HE SIGNIFICANT WATERSHED WORK in making masturbation a taboo.
Beginning as a much smaller production sometime as early as 1710, this title
seemed to expand in size with its growing popularity. Lawrence Stone describes
Onania as the "first popular pamphlet which spoke frankly about the terrible
moral and physical dangers of masturbation . . . published in London in about
1710 by an anonymous clergyman." "Despite its vapid moralizing," explains
Stone,
84
and implausible stories of resulting disease, the book was a great success. By
1760, thirty-eight thousand copies had been sold in nineteen English editions. It
had also been translated into French and German, so that it clearly struck some
hidden area of anxiety in early eighteenth-century Europe. Even Bernard de
Mandeville accepted the theory and warned in 1724 that youthful masturbation,
'the first lewd trick that boys learn', could lead to impotence if practised in
excess. In 1764 [sic] the internationally celebrated Swiss Dr Tissot weighed in
with a learned medical treatise on the subject, which gave the problem the
dignity of full authoritative medical recognition. [The Family, Sex and Marriage in
England 1500-1800 (abridged edition, NY: Harper & Row; Harper Torchbooks,
1979), 320]
SCARCE; I purchased this copy from an older bookseller friend (now deceased) in
early 1992. Consistent with Stone, OCLC shows editions possibly as early as