Another practice resorted to by nurse-girls and mothers is to amuse the child by gently striking its buttocks, a region which is highly erogenous. Every one who has read “Les Confessions,” by Rousseau, knows how this savant, when a boy, became sexually excited when his nurse punished him by whipping him on his buttocks. Thus nurses, and even mothers, innocently induce the child to the habit of masturbation. A still greater danger lurks from vicious servants and voluptuous nurse-girls who deliberately handle the infant’s or the very young child’s lumbus libidinis causa. They touch and strike the genitals of boys as well as that of girls for their own pleasure. There are few nurse-girls, says Parke, who do not delight to initiate the boy, committed to their care, in sexual matters. He relates many histories of patients who were induced to abnormal practices by their nurses in early youth. Lawson-Tait, in warning parents against allowing children to sleep with their nurses or with servants, says that in every instance where he found a number of children affected by masturbation, the contagion could be traced to a servant. Freund relates several examples of severe youthful hysteria where the starting-point could be traced to some sexual manipulations by servants, nurse-girls and governesses. Sexual precocity is, therefore, not seldom caused by tactile stimulation. Still in the majority of cases precocity may be easily traced to a hereditary taint. CHAPTER XVI ANAESTHESIA Under the caption of sexual anaesthesia will be treated here not only the deficiency of sexual emotion or the absence of the sexual feeling, i. e., the impotence of voluptas or the lack of erotic desire, but all other deficiencies, declines or abatements in the realm of sex, such as absence of experiencing satisfaction, impotency of copulation and of propagation. _Etiology of male impotence._—In the etiology of impotence three main causes must be taken into consideration. Impotence is almost always met with in congenital or acquired malformation. Such anomalies lie more in the province of surgery and need not be considered here any further. Impotence is also found as a symptom in certain constitutional diseases. The patients suffering from these troubles, are seeking medical advice more for their causative anomaly than for the symptom of impotence, which in these cases is of secondary importance. Hence the consideration of these cases may also be omitted. The anomaly of impotence par excellence and for which medical advice is mostly sought is nervous impotence. This impotence from nervous collapse is the commonest and complicates all other kinds.