The manner of using electricity for the relief of prostatic disease is very simple. My experience has led me into the habit of placing the positive pole as closely in contact as possible with the gland. I sometimes introduce an electrode into the urethra――other times into the rectum――connecting the anode, and with the cathode and large wetted sponge stroking the lumbar and sacral regions, especially over the origin of the hypogastric nerve and plexus. If there be tenderness over any part of the spinal cord, I change the poles and apply the anode to the spinal tenderness. Such tenderness is very common over the sacral plexus. Again, it is important in the way of ascertaining causes, to know which antedates the other, the prostatic tenderness or the spinal tenderness; and the anode should be applied to that irritation which is found to be the most ancient; as, commonly, upon the spinal tenderness the prostatic irritation depends. But this rule is not always tenable, yet will answer very well in a new case until an electric test, as it were, is obtained. Whenever unrest, pain or fulness follows the use of one pole to the gland, it is safe to change; as such is not the desired effect. There is no one thing so needful in the use of electricity as familiarity with the physiological effects wrought. Every electrician has marked out the management of a patient, and the course proper to pursue, only to find an entire change necessary, after the first application. Many cases are plain, but many more are wonderfully obscure; and only after repeated practical tests, do we find the proper current, intensity and quantity adapted to a given case. CHAPTER X. _Spermatorrhœa._――That special form of sexual neurosis, which has for its most common phenomenon the premature and involuntary ejaculation of seminal fluid, has been the great catch-all of fakirs and venders of popular sexual literature. Not a town of any size in any country is without an advertising spermatorrhœa doctor, who cries his vocation and writes up his fraudulent certificates of thousands of cases cured, and the great danger of millions more sinking into premature decay. Strange that laws are not made to prohibit this wholesale deception of a confiding and innocent class of young men. Spermatorrhœa does exist, but in proportion to the effects of masturbation and sexual debauch, grave injury is exceedingly uncommon. Not because spermatorrhœa is a commonly grave disease, do I insert this paragraph; but because of the unpopularity of the subject, the isolated cases that are really bad, and the still more isolated ones that fall into the hands of the legitimate physician.