On spermatorrhoea : its pathology, results, and complications / by J.L. Milton.

  • Milton, J. L. (John Laws), 1820-1898.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On spermatorrhoea : its pathology, results, and complications / by J.L. Milton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    inclination to act in much the same way if they only had the power to do so. Let the reader turn to the dawn of that age on which, at a later date, the labours of Hunter were to shed undying lustre. The days of the stern, thorough-going governments of the Plantagenets and Tudors are gone, to return no more. The spirit of Locke, and Newton, and Bentley is abroad. Men feel the influence of Harvey, Sydenham, and Radcliffe, and the genius of medicine is slowly but resistlessly clearing itself a path through the dense ignorance and prejudice that surrounded it. But when we come to wander through the literature of these disorders; when we are forced, in spite of ourselves, to notice the struggle of the more selfish and lower passions in resisting this progress, we see even a darker phase of human nature than in the former epochs. Everywhere popular prejudice, whether it be among the professed and acknow- ledged leaders of society, or the dregs of the people, is, with a few honourable exceptions, leagued with quackery against the legiti- mate practitioner, and both find only too many supporters in the profession itself. The intolerant, it is true, could now no longer avail themselves of faggot and stake; but they could vilify, and that they did in good earnest. One very natural result of this and of the imperfect legislation of the time was, that quackery throve apace, and in no domain so much as that of venereal disorders. The most arrant empiric was much on a par with his diplomaed rival. A regiment of the first class was handed over to one char- latan ; the pills of another were sold at a guinea a dozen ; nobility and even royalty1 availed themselves of the vaunted skill of a third; and the public here, at any rate, openly sympathized with any man who professed to wage war against chartered monopoly. The charlatan, as ever, stuck at nothing that served his pur- pose ; the surgeon and physician refused, from motives of honour, to profit by scandalous fraud, and were laughed at for their pains. What, at a later date, was Hunter’s reward for the devotion with which he laboured at the study of venereal disease ? Why, that he was written at and written down, carped at, and controverted on every side, till, if what his opponents say be correct, not a line 1 The infamous quack, St. Andre, the associate of the notorious Mary Toft, was, in 1726, chirurgeon to the king’s household.