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tion on this subject of infantile masturbation, though there are probably few physicians of experience in this country who cannot recall facts equally astonishing with those we are about to quote.
Dr. Doussin Dubreuil relates the case of a child who contracted the habit spontaneously at the age of five years, who, in spite of all that could be done, died at sixteen, having lost his reason at eleven. Deslandes, in his work on onanism, speaks of a confirmed masturbator at eighteen months!
Another case was that of inveterate priapism in a child four years of age. The erethism had continued during four or five entire days. The urine was voided drop by drop, and the paroxysms of suffering were at intervals extreme. The attending physician reports that he found the little patient surrounded by ladies and "wise" old women, who were actually endeavoring to reduce the organ by immodest procedures. The secret was found to consist wholly in the presence of a minute calculus which had lodged in the urethra, and which being removed the erethism subsided; but a well-nigh fatal lesson had been imparted through the insane attempts at relief.
"A young man from Montpelier" (we translate from Tissot), "a student of medicine, died from excess of this kind of debauch. The idea of his crime so agitated his mind that he died in a kind of despair, believing that he saw hell open at his side to receive him. A child of this city, six or seven years of age, instructed by a female servant, polluted himself so often that the slow fever which resulted very soon terminated fatally. His fury for this act was so great that it could not be prevented, even in the last days of his life. When told that he was hastening
