Considering the number of "perversions" that are possible in human sexual behaviour it is amazing that masturbation should have been most condemned in history.

One reason for this is undoubtedly that masturbation is common in any society whereas many other types of deviant sexuality are rare. It is hard to think of a disease or debilitating condition that has not been represented, at one time or another, as an effect of masturbation.

The following are picked at random from quotes in Alex Comfort as supposed consequences of "self-abuse"- impotence, tabes dorsalis, pulmonary consumption, dyspepsia, dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, hypochondriasis, loss of memory, fatuity, hysteria, asthma, melancholia, mania, dementia, paralysis and death! What is surprising is that medical men believed that such conditions could be caused by masturbation, a practice which as we are told ad nauseum in these enlightened times- is entirely harmless.

Alex Comfort points out that masturbation concerned few medical writers prior to 1720 - and at least one writer saw it as a desirable practice.

An anonymous author of "Hippolytus Redivivus" (1644) represented masturbation as a remedy against the dangerous allurements of Woman. Perhaps such an argument would not be popular today: at least it was preferable to the hysteria that was to follow in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries!