Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-attraction: for the use of Physicians and Students of Medical JurisprudenceTalmey, Bernard Simon
Science
Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-attraction: for the use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence
Talmey, Bernard Simon
Sex
Even the physician who is often called upon for advice about things
pertaining to the psychological phase of sex, prudishly ignores the
mightiest of human instincts which is so intimately related to human
weal and woe. He is conversant with the sexual question by virtue of
its anatomical and physiological knowledge, and he is well aware of
its hygienic, sociological and ethical importance. But when he is to
furnish enlightenment on psychic or pedagogic questions of sex, he
is embarrassed because of a lack of knowledge of sex psychology. The
great teachers in our medical schools, who ought to impart to their
pupils all their knowledge about the nature of things concerning Love
that they have gathered in their long and extensive experience, seem
either to consider Love a subject too sacred for physiological and
psychological analysis, or are really afraid to arouse the anger of the
zealots who made of the sanctuary of sex-attraction a “noli me tangere.”
Only the writers of fiction and poetry are allowed to approach the
sanctuary of Love, because with their abnormal imagination they sang
dithyrambs on this natural sentiment and morbidly transformed it into
a supernatural, obscure phenomenon. The hyperaesthetic writers of this
morbid fiction are encouraged to continue their practice of elevating
the natural sentiment of love to the height of a fetich, which only the
lover is capable of understanding. The scientist who dared to analyze
this sentiment, so important to the human race, and tried to enlighten
us about the nature of the attraction of the sexes, was met with
the cry, “To the Tarpeian rock.” The unbiased observer was declared
incapable of feeling and comprehending this natural sentiment. Even
philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, Hartman and Spencer, though they
touched upon the subject only from a philosophical point of view,
without probing it with the anatomist’s scalpel, have been decried as
heartless and soulless cynics whom nature denied the possession of this
sublimest of sentiments, because they dared to attack the majesty of
Love.
No wonder, therefore, that no other physical function has been treated
with so stepmotherly a regard and scant attention as the important
instinct of the preservation of the species, no wonder that no other
physiological phenomenon has been approached with such hesitancy as
the study of love in man. The works on physiology and gynaecology are
significantly silent on the subject of this important sentiment, and
the practitioner who so often has to deal with the pathological side of
love looks in vain for light in his text-books.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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