It is remarkable that, while the sexual associations of whipping, whether in slight or in marked degrees, are so frequent in modern times, they appear to be by no means easy to trace in ancient times.  “Flagellation,” I find it stated by a modern editor of the Priapeia, “so extensively practised in England as a provocation to venery, is almost entirely unnoticed by the Latin erotic writers, although, in the Satyricon of Petronius (ch. cxxxviii), Encolpius, in describing the steps taken by OEnothea to undo the temporary impotence to which he was subjected, says:  ’Next she mixed nasturtium-juice with southern wood, and, having bathed my foreparts, she took a bunch of green nettles, and gently whipped my belly all over below the navel.’” It appears also that many ancient courtesans dedicated to Venus as ex-votos a whip, a bridle, or a spur as tokens of their skill in riding their lovers.  The whip was sometimes used in antiquity, but if it aroused sexual emotions they seem to have passed unregarded.  “We naturally know nothing,” Eulenburg remarks (Sadismus und Masochismus, p. 72), “of the feelings of the priestess of Artemis at the flagellation of Spartan youths; or what emotions inspired the priestess of the Syrian goddess under similar circumstances; or what the Roman Pontifex Maximus felt when he castigated the exposed body of a negligent vestal (as described by Plutarch) behind a curtain, and the ‘plagosus Orbilius’ only practised on children.”

It was at the Renaissance that cases of abnormal sexual pleasure in flagellation began to be recorded.  The earliest distinct reference to a masochistic flagellant seems to have been made by Pico della Mirandola, toward the end of the fifteenth century, in his Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem, bk. iii, ch. xxvii.  Coelius Rhodiginus in 1516, again, narrated the case of a man he knew who liked to be severely whipped, and found this a stimulant to coitus.  Otto Brunfels, in his Onomasticon (1534), art.  “Coitus,” refers to another case of a man who could not have intercourse with his wife until he had been whipped.  Then, a century later, in 1643, Meibomius wrote De Usu Flagrorum in re Venerea, the earliest treatise on this subject, narrating various cases.  Numerous old cases of pleasure in flagellation and urtication were brought together by Schurig in 1720 in his Spermatologia, pp. 253-258.

The earliest definitely described medical case of sadistic pleasure in the sight of active whipping which I have myself come across belongs to the year 1672, and occurs in a letter in which Nesterus seeks the opinion of Garmann.  He knows intimately, he states, a very learned man—­whose name, for the honor he bears him, he refrains from mentioning—­who, whenever in a school or elsewhere he sees a boy unbreeched and birched, and hears him crying out, at once emits semen copiously without any erection, but with great