sexual abstinence.  When we come down to the sixteenth century outbreak of Protestantism we find that Luther’s revolt against Catholicism was in part a protest against the teaching of sexual abstinence.  “He to whom the gift of continence is not given,” he said in his Table Talk, “will not become chaste by fasting and vigils.  For my own part I was not excessively tormented [though elsewhere he speaks of the great fires of lust by which he had been troubled], but all the same the more I macerated myself the more I burnt.”  And three hundred years later, Bebel, the would-be nineteenth century Luther of a different Protestantism, took the same attitude towards sexual abstinence, while Hinton the physician and philosopher, living in a land of rigid sexual conventionalism and prudery, and moved by keen sympathy for the sufferings he saw around him, would break into passionate sarcasm when confronted by the doctrine of sexual abstinence.  “There are innumerable ills—­terrible destructions, madness even, the ruin of lives—­for which the embrace of man and woman would be a remedy.  No one thinks of questioning it.  Terrible evils and a remedy in a delight and joy!  And man has chosen so to muddle his life that he must say:  ’There, that would be a remedy, but I cannot use it.  I must be virtuous!’”

If we confine ourselves to modern times and to fairly precise medical statements, we find in Schurig’s Spermatologia (1720, pp. 274 et seq.), not only a discussion of the advantages of moderate sexual intercourse in a number of disorders, as witnessed by famous authorities, but also a list of results—­including anorexia, insanity, impotence, epilepsy, even death—­which were believed to have been due to sexual abstinence.  This extreme view of the possible evils of sexual abstinence seems to have been part of the Renaissance traditions of medicine stiffened by a certain opposition between religion and science.  It was still rigorously stated by Lallemand early in the nineteenth century.  Subsequently, the medical statements of the evil results of sexual abstinence became more temperate and measured, though still often pronounced.  Thus Gyurkovechky believes that these results may be as serious as those of sexual excess.  Krafft-Ebing showed that sexual abstinence could produce a state of general nervous excitement (Jahrbuch fuer Psychiatrie, Bd. viii, Heft 1 and 2).  Schrenck-Notzing regards sexual abstinence as a cause of extreme sexual hyperaesthesia and of various perversions (in a chapter on sexual abstinence in his Kriminalpsychologische und Psychopathologische Studien, 1902, pp. 174-178).  He records in illustration the case of a man of thirty-six who had masturbated in moderation as a boy, but abandoned the practice entirely, on moral grounds, twenty years ago, and has never had sexual intercourse, feeling proud to enter marriage a chaste man, but now for years has suffered greatly from extreme sexual