United States or Tonga ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Hallucinations born of religious frenzy; idiosyncrasies with allotriophagical symptoms, a consequence of his ascetical mode of living; nymphomania of old age; hypochondriacal fancies: all symptoms that are frequently found together. To second his morbid intention of changing his diet and habits would be sheer lunacy; nay, worse, it would be actual murder.
The proper medical and hygienic treatment always restores order in such functional derangements and the sexual disturbances of the mind disappear. I have repeatedly cured nymphomania by curing physical, or constitutional symptoms.
However, it should be noted that most of these are known to have had a personal history including one or more such abnormalities as dysmenorrhea, uterine displacement, pathological ovaries, leucorrhea, tuberculosis, masturbation, neurasthenia, nymphomania, or other disturbances which are sufficient to account for local sexual stimulation. In short, such women are not normal.
After several years of it she evolved into a flushed, nervous victim of her own technique. She managed, however, to preserve her self-esteem by looking upon the perversion of her normal sexual instincts into a species of verbal nymphomania as an indication of a superior soul state. Radical books excited her mind as ordinarily her body might have been excited by radical caresses.
When occurring in women this is also called Nymphomania, and in men Satyriasis. It consists in an uncontrollable desire for sexual intercourse. Pyromania, an insane impulse to set fire to everything. Homicidal mania, a propensity to murder. Suicidal mania, a propensity to self-destruction. Some consider suicide as always a manifestation of insanity.
The case is recorded of a mentally deranged girl, with no nymphomania though she masturbated, who on taking small doses of opium at once showed signs of nymphomania, following men about, etc. Various other drugs have more or less reputation as aphrodisiacs; thus bromide of gold, a nervous and glandular stimulant, is said to have as one of its effects a heightening of sexual feeling.
In one case which came under my care, nymphomania appeared in a married woman in the seventh month of her pregnancy, and so fearfully did her mania rage that it threw her into convulsions.
"I know of no fact in pathology more striking and more terrifying than the way in which the phenomena of the ecstatic which have often been seized upon by sentimental theorisers as proofs of spiritual exaltation may be plainly seen to bridge the gulf between the innocent foolery of ordinary hypnotic patients and the degraded and repulsive phenomena of nymphomania and satyriasis." Dr.
Gilles de la Tourette, Féré, and Augagneur in France agree. Hegar, replying to the arguments of Bebel in his well-known book on women, denies that sexual abstinence can ever produce satyriasis or nymphomania. He adds that, so far as his own observations are concerned, the patients in asylums suffer scarcely at all from their compulsory sexual abstinence.
There is no doubt, on the other hand, that camphor has been successfully employed in cases of nymphomania, and that several medical writers have asserted its efficacy in neutralising the properties of cantharides, adducing instances which would appear to prove its sedative power: the following one is related by Groenvelt:
Word Of The Day