But this method of purgatives can never be proper, when this disorder is the consequence of venereal excesses, and is owing, as SENNERTUS observes, “to that weakness which the _vesiculæ seminales_ have contracted by the over-frequent vicissitudes of repletion and inanition.” A particularisation of some cases will afford a clearer notion of the true method of cure. TIMÆUS furnishes us with one, which cannot be better placed than here. “A young man, (says he,) a student of the Law, of a sanguine constitution, used to pollute himself manually twice or thrice a day, and sometimes oftener: he fell into a _gonorrhœa_, accompanied with a weakness of the whole body. I looked on the _gonorrhœa_ as a consequence of a relaxation occasioned in the seminal vessels, and on his weakness as owing to his frequent effusions of seed, which had dissipated the natural heat, gathered crudities, damaged the nervous system, stupified the soul, and weakened the whole body.” [He prescribed for him strengthening cordial wine, with the astringents and aromatics infused in a strong-bodied red wine, an electuary of the same nature, and an ointment composed of _oil of roses_, _mastic_, _nitre_, _bol. armen. terra sigillata_, _balaustæ_, and _white-wax_.] “The patient was in about a month’s time cured of this shameful disorder; and I advised him to abstain in future from this infamous practice of debauchery, and to remember the threat from the Most High, of an exclusion of the effeminate from the kingdom of Heaven,” 1 COR. vi.[161]. M. ZIMMERMAN writes me as follows: “One of the best Physicians that we have in Switzerland, M. WEPFER, whose authority cannot be of too great weight, avers his having cured a continual flux of seed, the consequence of self-pollution, with the help of the _Tinctur. Mart. Ludovici_. M. WESLIN of Zurzach has, on his own experience, confirmed to me the same thing. As for me (adds my friend) I cannot say that I have seen such good effects from it.”