_General Debility_.--Nervous exhaustion and the loss of the vivifying
influence of the seminal fluid produce extreme mental and physical
debility, which increases as the habit is practiced, and is continued
by involuntary emissions after the habit ceases. If the patient's
habits are sedentary, and if he had a delicate constitution at the start,
his progress toward the grave will be fearfully rapid, especially if
the habit were acquired young, as it most frequently is by such boys,
they being generally precocious. Extreme emaciation, sallow or
blotched skin, sunken eyes, surrounded by a dark or blue color, general
weakness, dullness, weak back, stupidity, laziness, or indisposition
to activity of any kind, wandering and illy defined pains, obscure and
often terrible sensations, pain in back and limbs, sleeplessness, and
a train of morbid symptoms too long to mention in detail, attend these
sufferers.

_Consumption_.--It is well recognized by the medical profession that
this vice is one of the most frequent causes of consumption. At least
such would seem to be the declaration of experience, and the following
statistical fact adds weight to the conclusion:--

"Dr. Smith read a paper before a learned medical association a few years
since in which he pointed out the startling fact that in one thousand
cases of consumption five hundred and eighteen had suffered from some
form of sexual abuse, and more than four hundred had been addicted to
masturbation or suffered from nocturnal emissions."[49]

[Footnote 49: Acton.]

"Most of those who early become addicted to self-pollution are soon
afterward the subjects, not merely of one or more of the ailments
already noticed, but also of enlargements of the lymphatic and other
glands, ultimately of _tubercular deposits in the lungs_ and other
viscera, or of scrofulous disease of the vertebrae or bones, or of other
structures, more especially of the joints."[50]

[Footnote 50: Copland.]

Many young men waste away and die of symptoms resembling consumption
which are solely the result of the loathsome practice of self-abuse.
The real number of consumptives whose disease originates in this manner
can never be known.

_Dyspepsia_.--Indigestion is frequently one of the first results.
Nervous exhaustion is always felt by the stomach very promptly. When
dyspepsia is once really established, it reacts upon the genital organs,
increasing their irritability as well as that of all the res