MATRIMONIAL EXCESS

“But this is not the only form of sin assumed by this propensity. It invades married life, and sows the seeds of misery within the hallowed pale of wedlock. Reference is not now had to those who, though married, seek foreign indulgence; but to those who know their own legal companion only. This will surprise many who are married, because they think themselves entitled to any desired amount of indulgence. Far otherwise. Nature cares nothing, knows nothing about human enactments. Excessive indulgence between husband and wife produces all the consequences shown in the last chapter to result from excessive Amativeness. A miserable victim of connubial excess is hardly less miserable than the victim of licentiousness. A newly-married husband once called upon a medical friend of the author to prescribe for what he supposed to be venereal disease, contracted from his wife. Soon after, she called on the same errand; both accusing each other of having given the disease. He told both that their hymeneal excess had inflamed and diseased both, and prescribed moderation.SOAP 233.3

But, what stamps effectually the seal of nature’s reprobation on excessive matrimonial indulgence, is its destruction of the health of woman. Is it not a most prolific cause of those distressing female complaints which bury half our married women prematurely, and seriously impair most of the balance? Testify, Drs. Sherwood, Banning, Hollick, Benjamin, and others, in this line of practice; are not these complaints alarmingly prevalent, and occasioned mainly by excessive indulgence? Do not thousand of our women die annually in consequence? Speak out, ye weakly, nervous wives, now dying by wretched inches of these diseases, and say whether your sufferings were not caused mainly, and have not been aggravated to their present painfulness, by the frequency, the fury, the almost goatishness, of your husbands’ demands? I say fury, because though frequency is bad, yet harshness is worse; nor do husbands always consider how exceedingly tender, and how liable to consequent inflammation and disease, this apparatus. Many a husband has buried more wives than one, killed outright, ignorantly, yet effectually, by the brutality of this passion. Reader, if thou knowest none such, thou knowest not the cause of all the deaths that transpire around thee! And yet, the pulpit, the press, the lecture room, are silent in view of this vast, this wicked waste of life - of even the infinitely valuable life of woman!SOAP 234.1

“And tens of thousands of those whom it does not kill, it nevertheless despoils, by impairing both their sexual organs, and their health, as well as minds. More: It cuts off the very pleasure sought. As over-eating diminishes appetite, and thus curtails the gustatory pleasure sought, so excess here engenders those diseases which cut off this very pleasure. By causing the prolapsus uteri, albus, etc., it renders this intercourse utterly repugnant mentally, and painful physically; thus inducing the penalty in the direct line of the transgression.SOAP 235.1