Samuel-Auguste Tissot
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Tissot regards masturbation as commoner in women than in men; Deslandes believed that there was no difference between the sexes. Lawson Tait, Spitzka, and Dana, inclined rather to Metchnikoff's view as to the greater rarity of the practice among women."--The Sexual Life of Our Time (1907) by Iwan Bloch |
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Samuel Auguste André David Tissot (1728 - 1797) was a 18th Century Swiss physician, best-known for his work L'Onanisme (1760).
Life and work
A well reputed Swiss-Calvinist neurologist, physician, professor and Vatican adviser who practiced in the Swiss city of Lausanne. He wrote on epilepsy, migraines, and other nervous conditions.
He devoted an 83 page chapter to the study of migraine in his Traité des nerfs et de leurs maladies (Treatise on the nerves and nervous disorders). He used his own observations and the existing medical treatises of the day. His work is considered by modern doctors as a basis for "future generations of doctors." He is also recognized as "the classical authority on migraine."
In 1760, he published L'Onanisme, his own comprehensive medical treatise on the purported ill-effects of masturbation. Citing case studies of young male masturbators amongst his patients in Lausanne, Switzerland as basis for his reasoning, Tissot argued that semen was an "essential oil" and "stimulus" that, when lost from the body in great amounts, would cause "a perceptible reduction of strength, of memory and even of reason; blurred vision, all the nervous disorders, all types of gout and rheumatism, weakening of the organs of generation, blood in the urine, disturbance of the appetite, headaches and a great number of other disorders."
On 1 April 1787, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to Dr. Tissot complimenting him for spending his “days in treating humanity” noting that his “reputation has reached even into the mountains of Corsica” and describing “the respect I have for your works…"
Major work
