Home Treatment for Sexual Abuses (1853)

AUTHOR: Trall, Russell Thacher

KEYWORDS: food, hydropathy, sexuality, Temperance

 

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)

Trall names the consumption of animal products as one of the causes of masturbation. He paints a dramatic portrait of the disastrous effects of “self-pollution” and its quasi-epidemic status. He makes no distinction between classes of people (rich/poor, men/women, educated/illiterate), except on the basis of age. Young people are more likely to be perverted due to their impressionable nature and the lack of education on the subject. Rather than a moral vice, Trall proposes to consider the problem from a physiological perspective, as a deviation of the sexual instinct from its natural (“legitimate”) purpose. The book offers the list of the numerous causes of and remedies for this problem. Tralls quotes from one of the many letters he receives from prospective patients:

I was poisoned with drugs in my cradle, and contaminated with swine-flesh in childhood. In my very first lessons on the subject of eating and drinking, I was taught that pork, ham, sausages, lard, in fact all parts of the filthy hog, were the best possible aliment. I learned to regard coffee, cider, and even whisky as necessary beverages; and the benefit or propriety of using water, either internally or externally, was left wholly to the decision of perverted instinct, until, by chance, I got hold of a stray number of the Water-Cure Journal (xvii-xviii).

In the first chapter, Trall addresses excessive sexual excitement, arguing that the consumption of “animal food” is second, after “improper nursing,” among the causes of abnormal sexual excitement. “It is the unanimous opinion of all writers on this subject, that the early employment of animal food —flesh, fish, and fowl — is not only highly pernicious to the moral and intellectual development of the child, but peculiarly injurious in giving undue ascendency to the lowest propensities” (27-28). Later sections criticize specific dishes (e.g. salted meats, alcoholic or acidic beverages) and debunk popular misconceptions, such as the idea that a pescetarian diet is better than a meat-based diet. Other causes include “obstructed skin” (i.e. dirty), “improper clothing”, “sedentary habits” and “obscene books and conversation”.

The general treatment that he prescribes includes physical and mental activity, as well as diet: “This can hardly be too plain and simple. It must be strictly vegetable, as well as abstemious. Every kind of animal food must be prohibited, and even milk can seldom be used without injury — never at the evening meal” (86). This advice is followed by a very plain dietetic plan, which Trall acknowledges to be quite meager in comparison to a “stimulating” diet (88) but he advises patients to persevere during the first stages of hunger or even depression. The advice tjat follows concerns drink, sleep and personal hygiene (baths).