L’usage du sexe: Lettres au Dr Tissot, auteur de “L’onanisme” (1760) by Patrick Singy (review)

In L’usage du sexe: Lettres au Dr Tissot, auteur de “L’onanisme” (1760), Patrick Singy has gathered together a collection of letters from patients seeking medical advice about their illnesses from the very famous Swiss doctor. The correspondents told him about their sexual activities as well as their eating and drinking habits, their elimination of urine and feces, their physical exercises and activities, their sleeping habits, and their other daily routines—anything that they thought might be affecting their physical health. They did not tell the doctor about their desires, their feelings, their dreams, or their inner sense of self. In a curious way, these letters are remarkably objective; they are blunt and to the point, without too much angst. They lack the emotional intensity of early modern confessions, which belong to the discourse of the flesh, or of the later autobiographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which belong to the discourse of sexuality. The contrast between these two discourses, Singy argues, has dominated writing in the history of sexuality ever since Michel Foucault published his provocative little book, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction.¹

Focusing primarily but not exclusively on the subject of masturbation in the eighteenth century, Singy disputes the prevailing thesis put forth by Théodore Tarczylo (1983), Jean Stengers and Anne van Neck (1998, 2001), Thomas W. Lacqueur (2003), and others who have traced the modern preoccupation with masturbation to the anonymous publication of Onania in 1715 and to Tissot’s L’onanisme (1760).² Singy points out that these two works are radically different from each other. Onania belongs to the history of the flesh and was part of a moral discourse and a theology of the will that postulated a distinction between voluntary acts and involuntary acts. In this 1715 version, masturbation, defined as self-pollution, is a voluntary and therefore sinful act; it is harmful to the soul and to the body. Nocturnal emissions, on the other hand, are generally involuntary acts and are therefore not sinful, not part of the will’s rebellion against God.

In contrast, Tissot’s L’onanisme belongs to the history of semen, part of the Western tradition of medicine, dating back to the ancient Greeks, that was based upon a theory of the humors. It defined masturbation as a problem for the individual’s physical and, to a lesser extent, mental well-being. This physical well-being required the well-proportioned balance of the four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile). Semen, as a product of all the humors, was considered extremely important to the well-regulated body. To retain too much semen was as bad for the individual’s health as to lose too much semen. Masturbation was, therefore, a reliable means to expel too much semen (when marital intercourse was unavailable), although more often than not it led to the loss of too much semen, especially when it became an excessive habit. Heterosexual intercourse could also result in the loss of too much semen (although contact with female secretions often counterbalanced this loss), and too little intercourse could lead to the retention of too much semen. Moderation was considered the ideal for both physical and mental health.

To support his argument about the gulf that separated Onania from L’onanisme, Singy relies on the evidence in the letters that readers of L’onanisme sent to Dr. Tissot. Both Tissot and his correspondents, Singy argues, relied upon this theory of semen. Tissot’s correspondents understood health in terms of a physical balance between various elements within the body, and they used this imagery in their descriptions of their physical well-being (or lack thereof). They did not engage in emotional introspection, as the congregant might do with a priest in the early modern period or a patient might do with his psychiatrist in the late nineteenth and...