Handbook of insanity for practitioners and students / by Theodore Kirchhoff.

  • Kirchhoff, Theodor, 1853-1922.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Handbook of insanity for practitioners and students / by Theodore Kirchhoff. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    107/420 (page 97)
    SEXUAL IRRITATION. uterine examination. Some of these patients manifest un- usual cleanliness, are constantly combing the hair or wasli- ing the bod} . The bounds of modesty are overstepped l>\ attending to the wants of nature in the presence of the physician, or by carrying around the night vessel as soon as he appears. Or the patients suddenly strip them- selves on seeing a man and offer to perform coitus, or they lie in bed and imitate sexual intercourse by the corre- sponding movements of the body and face. Still more disgusting is the tendency of these patients to smear faces and urine, and this connection of disordered sexual sense and olfactory sense reminds us of the clinical, and perhaps anatomical, association of these functions. Sexually ex- cited patients often have distinct olfactory hallucinations. Special odors sometimes give rise to sexual fancies. The greatest increase of this disorder leads to violent assaults upon men, vile and abusive language being employed in order to conceal the true feeling. At other times similar attacks occur as the result of annoying feelings, and these conditions must be sharply differentiated. The term nymphomania, applied to the most extreme cases, is a mis- nomer, because the condition is not an independent disease of the sexual sense. The frequent combination of religious mysticism with sexual irritative conditions is an important fact. De- vout prayers in sexually excited individuals, uninterrupted religious exercises, constant reading of lives of the saints which are full of the temptations of the flesh, the occa- ‘ sional occurrence of the most terrible orgies in certain revivals show the causal connection and clinical relation- ship between religious fervor and sexual desire. The transmutation of the sexually colored contents of con- sciousness into firm delusions retains, in these cases, the striking association of religious and sexual elements; the patient calls herself the bride of Christ, or the Virgin Mar}. This combination is more frequent in women, but m men there is also found a constant association of relig- xous delusions with sexual irritative conditions which,