George Drysdale (1823-1904) wrote, anonymously, Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion (1854), a pioneering guide to contraception and sexual disease that was condemned by the pious as "the Bible of the Brothel."
Drysdale arrived at his progressive ideas after an adolescence and young manhood crippled by sexual ignorance and sexual panic. At the age of fifteen, he "accidentally'' discovered masturbation and found that the practice offered an 'easy mode of satisfying his passions, which had long been the source of unrest and torment to his vivid imagination.' He masturbated, poor Victorian fellow, two or three times a day and involuntarily endured occasional nighttime 'discharges'. He was overcome with guilt and even more so tortured by the fear that, as he was instructed by prevailing doctrine, the 'loss' of semen would sap his strength and inevitably lead him to madness. Hard to believe -- but such notions were commonplace among our recent, ignorant ancestors.
It gets worse. He was so distressed by his uncontrollable onanism that on trip to Hungary, he faked a suicide, leaving his clothes and identification beside a river.
And worse still. While in Hungary, he underwent a series of procedures to deaden and destroy the nerve endings of the penis "by inserting into the urethra a thin metal rod coated in a caustic substance. He submitted to this procedure seven or eight times." It didn't work -- at least in the sense that it didn't diminish his passion for masturbation. I also suspect that it might have hurt.
It gets better, though. He resurrected himself and came back to his family after he consulted a doctor who offered the breathtakingly brilliant prescription that he "try coition." Intercourse with prostitutes, he discovered, quite cured his urge to masturbate. Holy moley, what a revelation! What a fucking breakthrough!
Drysdale never married but in later life he lived for many years with a woman named Susannah Spring.
Now, if you were writing a novel about a person who "dies" and returns to life and you called his mistress or partner or whatever she was by the name Spring, with its obvious overtones of rebirth, you would be justifiably accused of moralism or allegorizing or heavy-handedness. Nevertheless, truth is truth to the end of the chapter and Susannah Spring she was.
I hope George and Susannah were happy together. I hope they frequently and joyously "tried coition." The poor boy deserved a few good years.
(I've pilfered the story of George Drysdale from Kate Summerscale's revelatory Mrs.Robinson's Disgrace [New York, 2012]).
Comments