It's The Year 1830 And 'Dead At 17: The Fatal Consequences Of Masturbation Is Published' In France

U I Team
Jun 23
3 min read

‘He was young and handsome…his mother’s hope.’

He was young and handsome, his mother’s pride and joy, but he died in torment, blind, sick and paralysed, at the age of seventeen. If only he’d known the perils of masturbation, then he might have lived a better life.

So goes the melodramatic warning to young French lads, printed in Le livre sans titre (The Book With No Title) back in 1830. In those days, letting your hands wander was apparently more dangerous than juggling knives while blindfolded. Moralists and physicians were united in horror: self-love, they insisted, would drag you to an early grave.

This dire outlook wasn’t cooked up overnight either. Over a century earlier, in 1716, a stern chap named Dr Balthazar Bekker published Onania, a pamphlet dedicated to scaring the living daylights out of anyone with an idle moment alone. According to Bekker, dabbling in the “heinous sin” of “self-pollution” would cause:

Disturbances of the stomach and digestion, loss of appetite or ravenous hunger, vomiting, nausea, weakening of the organs of breathing, coughing, hoarseness, paralysis, weakening of the organ of generation to the point of impotence, lack of libido, back pain, disorders of the eye and ear, total diminution of bodily powers, paleness, thinness, pimples on the face, decline of intellectual powers, loss of memory, attacks of rage, madness, idiocy, epilepsy, fever and finally suicide.

So, basically, everything short of spontaneous combustion.

A few decades later, in 1745, Dr Robert James, a respected British physician, no less, doubled down on the panic in his weighty Medicinal Dictionary, solemnly declaring that onanism was behind “the most deplorable and generally incurable disorders.”

Not to be outdone, the Swiss doctor Samuel-Auguste Tissot wrote L’Onanisme, arguing that semen was an irreplaceable body oil and any reckless squandering would be paid for in all sorts of miserable ways. He warned it would cause:

...a perceptible reduction of strength, of memory and even of reason; blurred vision, all the nervous disorders, all types of gout and rheumatism, weakening of the organs of generation, blood in the urine, disturbance of the appetite, headaches and a great number of other disorders.

Reading this lot, you’d think half of Europe should have been blind, bent double and babbling nonsense by age twenty.

But here’s the twist: these men weren’t shady snake-oil salesmen. They were, in their day, respected experts — products of the Enlightenment, that grand age of reason and science. If anything, their warnings show how even clever people can go down peculiar rabbit holes when it comes to bodily matters they don’t quite understand.

So next time you come across a health fad that sounds a bit far-fetched, spare a thought for that poor, handsome French lad who (allegedly) died because no one told him what not to do with his spare time. Some cautionary tales age better than others.