“The stomach often rejects food, and is affected with acidity, and loathing; the nervous system becomes highly irritable; neuralgia, tabes dorsalis, pulmonary consumption, or fatal marasmus, terminate the suffering, or else insanity and deplorable idiocy are the fatal result. Long before such an event, the mind is enfeebled, the memory impaired, and the power of fixing the attention wholly lost. These are symptoms which should awaken our attention to the danger of the case, and which should induce us to sound the alarm, and if possible arrest the victim from the inevitable consequences of persisting in the habit. “In females, leucorrhœa is often induced by masturbation, and I doubt not incontinence of urine, stranguary, prolapsus uteri, disease of the clitoris, and many other diseases, both local and general, which have been attributed to other causes. “It is often difficult to obtain information on the subject of masturbation. Where it is suspected by the physician, the friends are wholly ignorant on the subject, and the individual, suffering, is not ready to acknowledge a practice which he is conscious is filthy in the extreme, although he may have had no suspicions of its deleterious influence upon his health. “It is not sufficient that we know the consequences of masturbation, for these are often irremediable disease; we ought to know the symptoms of its commencement, of the incipient stages of those diseases which result from it, as well as the influence which the moderate practice of it will have upon the physical and mental stamina of the man--for it is not too much to say that the practice cannot be followed by either sex, even in a moderate way, without injury, especially by the young. “Nature designs that this drain upon the system should be reserved to mature age, and even then that it be made but sparingly. Sturdy manhood, in all its vigor, loses its energy and bends under the too frequent expenditure of this important secretion; and no age or condition will protect a man from the danger of unlimited indulgence, legally and naturally exercised. “In the young, however, its influence is much more seriously felt; and even those who have indulged so cautiously as not to break down the health or the mind, cannot know how much their physical energy, mental vigor, or moral purity, have been affected by the indulgence. “_Nothing short of total abstinence can save those who have become the victims of it._ In this indulgence, no half way course will ever subdue the disease, or remove the effect of the habit from the system. Total abstinence is the only remedy. If the constitution is not fatally impaired--if organic disease has not taken place, this remedy will prove effectual, and must be adopted, especially in all cases in which the effects are visible, or the consequences cannot fail to be ultimately fatal.