LOVE A Treatise on the Science of Sex-Attraction For the Use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence BY BERNARD S. TALMEY, M. D. _With forty-seven cuts, eighty-four drawings, in the text_ THIRD REVISED EDITION Einstweilen, bis den Bau der Welt Philosophie zusammenhält, Erhält _sie_ das Getriebe Durch Hunger und durch Liebe. —SCHILLER, “_Die Weltweisen_.” PRACTITIONERS’ PUBLISHING COMPANY NEW YORK CITY Copyrighted, 1919, by CECILIA TALMEY PREFACE Not only among laymen but also among serious thinkers and writers on medical topics the opinion is generally prevalent, that there is a vast difference in the degree of intensity of the sex-impulse in men and women. Upon this supposition rests the justification of the double standard of sexual morality of the two sexes. If the intensity of the amatory emotions is the same in both sexes, then there is no justification for a double standard of sexual morality. Now, an emotion is, in its nature, subjective. Its intensity can never be objectively determined. Men and women may dispute the question of the different degree of intensity of the amatory emotions till the end of time, still they will never reach a definite conclusion. The only way to determine the nature of an emotion is to study its pathology. If it can be shown that the same pathological entities of the sex-instinct are found in men and women, the inference is justified that the normal emotions are also the same or similar in both sexes. To prove the similarity or identity of the intensity of the sex-impulse in both sexes, the author published in the winter of 1906-1907 his book “Woman, A Treatise on the Normal and Pathological Emotions of Feminine Love.” Since the publication of “Woman” he received numerous letters with requests to write a similar treatise on the amatory emotions of men. In 1910 the author published “Genesis, A Manual for the Instruction of Children in Matters Sexual.” He thought that the Description of the evolution of sex in plant and animal in “Genesis” might supply the demand. Still the requests continued to arrive. He then published, in 1912, “Neurasthenia Sexualis, A Treatise on Sexual Impotence in Men and Women.” In this treatise the anatomy and physiology of the male organs of generation were thoroughly discussed. Still it did not fill the demand. The chapter on pathology dealt only with impotence.