Sex-education: A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its relation to human lifeBigelow, Maurice A. (Maurice Alpheus)
Science
Sex-education: A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its relation to human life
Bigelow, Maurice A. (Maurice Alpheus)
Sex instruction
If there were no other reasons for sex-instruction, I believe that it
would be worth while to teach such hygienic knowledge of self and sex
as would guard young people against harmful habits and unhealthful care
of their sexual mechanisms; and which, moreover, would guide them
across the threshold of adolescence with some helpful understanding of
the significance of the metamorphosis. Many men and women suffer from
injured, if not ruined, health because they did not know, especially
between ten and fourteen years, the laws of personal sex-hygiene, which
concern health in ways not involving sexual relationship. Many boys and
some girls are injured both physically and mentally by the habit of
masturbation. Numerous girls are injured physically and many mentally
because they have not learned in advance the nature and hygiene of
menstruation. Many boys are injured both in mind and character because
they have no scientific guidance which helps them understand themselves
during the stormy transition from youth into manhood. Moreover, there
are certain simple hygienic commands that children under twelve should
receive from parents and teachers. In all these lines the bearings of
personal hygienic instruction are so obvious that we need not at this
time stop to consider in more detail this first reason or problem for
sex-instruction of young people.
Sec. 7. _Second Problem for Sex-instruction: Social Diseases_
[Sidenote: Recent publicity regarding vice and disease.]
During the past decade the general public has received some astounding
revelations concerning the enormous extent of illicit sexual
promiscuity, which is immorality according to our commonly accepted
code of morals. Along with the evidence as to the existence of
widespread promiscuity, has come the still more alarming information
from the medical profession that sexual promiscuity commonly
distributes the germs of the two highly infectious and exceedingly
destructive diseases, syphilis and gonorrhea, known in medical science
as venereal or social. When these are acquired by individuals guilty of
sexual promiscuity, they seriously and often fatally affect the victim;
but of far greater social-hygienic importance is the medical evidence
that they are very often transmitted to persons innocent of any
transgression of the moral law, especially to wives and children.
The medical revelations concerning the relation of sexual immorality to
the plague of social diseases, has come from certain eminent
physicians, notably the late Dr. Prince A. Morrow. His translation of
Fournier's "Syphilis and Marriage" (1881), his own "Social Diseases and
Marriage" (1904), and several of his pamphlets published by the
American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, have been
authoritative statements of conditions as the medical world sees them.
[Sidenote: Social diseases and immorality.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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