Dr. William H. Howell, Professor of Physiology at Johns Hopkins University, says:  “There is no evidence whatsoever that the sexual appetite or the act of reproduction has any physiological relationship to the preservation of the integrity of the individual.  This appetite has been created or evolved and made strong in us for an entirely different purpose.  A sexual necessity exists only so far as the integrity of the race is concerned; so far as the individual is concerned his sexual functions may be unused or he may be completely unsexed without any injury to his bodily health.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] The full list of authorities is given in The Physician’s Answer, by M.J.  Exner, M.D., Secretary, Student Department, International Committee, Young Men’s Christian Associations, Association Press, New York, 1913.  This is the best treatment of the question of physiological necessity.  It is freely quoted in this chapter. [Editor.]

CHAPTER IV

MEDICAL PHASES

By Andrew C. Smith

Some idea of the prevalence of venereal diseases in the United States may be obtained from the following statistics of the census for 1910.  The registration area covered a population of 48,877,893 persons.  The figures are here extended to cover a population of 90,000,000 people:  Deaths ascribed to venereal disease, 5275; spinal cord diseases, 2598; paresis, 4845.  Other diseases partly due to syphilis:  softening of the brain, a term indiscriminately used to cover a number of diseases including brain syphilis and paresis, 2111; paralysis, usually meaning apoplexy, but always including many cases of brain syphilis, 14,479; premature birth, by some believed to be the result of syphilis in one half of all cases, 34,174; congenital debility, deaths due in many cases to feebleness of the child resulting from syphilis, 25,285; blindness, one fourth the total number of blind in this country estimated at 15,000 to 20,000.  Many estimate that over half of the entire male population have had gonorrhea.  The principal reason for this alarming distribution among all classes of these infections and their steady increase is ignorance and misunderstanding of physiological facts, particularly the viciously false teaching of the street corner that sexual activity is a physiological necessity.

These diseases would be arrested were there a widespread knowledge of their disastrous effects.  Although young men hear the mischievous lie that “gonorrhea is no worse than a bad cold,” thousands of them are punished with sterility as a result of the disease.  Nearly all the neglected cases result in so-called ascending infections, reaching the bladder and kidneys and causing many deaths, and many men carry the infection in dormant form, to infect innocent wives in later years.