GENITAL REFLEXES.

JOHN RODMAN, M. D.,

WAXAHACHIE, TEXAS.

Some years ago I read with consuming interest Dr. Dana's brochure, the "Passing of the Reflexes." I could not accept his conclusions then. I am less in accord with him now.

A reflex in this acceptation is a remote disturbance of a part of the human mechanism that cannot be anatomically demonstrated as directly connected with the provocative excitant.

A carious tooth may cause supraorbital neuralgia, because the nerves implicated are of a common origin. Severe piles or an operation therefor causes retention of urine because the fourth sacral supplies the anal and vesical sphincters.

Pelvic pressure will produce sciatica and muscular cramps in the legs, though the parts supplied may belong to different nerve systems. This is direct response. A reflex is an indirect response. A puzzling sympathy. Addendum, 1.

How many vague inexplicable pains, dispersed, almost at random, over the body have we seen dispelled and thereby explained by the special treatment of the immediate instruments of generation?

Whence clavus, nuchal tenderness, intercostal neuralgia and symptoms congenerous. You will most often see them associated with genital deviations.

A chronic dyspepsia attributable to no ingestive indiscretion or other traceable cause is frequently relieved by rectifying a deranged ovary uterus or an aberrant kidney.

Have you never seen a strongly suspected morbus coxæ demonstrated spurious by a circumcision in male or female or by other preaputio-glandular interference? Is sciatica ever relieved by an operative interference in varicocele, urethral stricture or rectal ulcer or vesicle stone?

Who can, to his complete satisfaction, elucidate puerperal insanity? Tell a layman it is auto-intoxication and he will subside to your great relief.

Who will explain, except by conjecture, the mental derangement of utero-ovarian origin? Yet can you doubt it? Does the ovarine exhibit a surplus of Dr. Wm. Hammond's cerebrine or meduline, or is there a deficiency of anusine?

Does post-operative insanity often follow a herniotomy, a resection of the bowel, a nephrectomy or other capital operation?

Is not conservative ovarian surgery aimed almost directly to the preservation of the mental equilibrium?

Late gynecological surgery has obtained a gain of 35 per cent. in the discharge rate of women from the asylums, operations for hernia have not resulted in a single cure of the mental condition.

In genital neurasthenia the mental element is more conspicuous than in other varieties, and is often the most important part-mental fatigue, wandering attention, blaseness, weak will power, amnesic debility.

Our asylums are crowded today with these genital unfortunates. Sana mens in sano corpore ought to be embannered in letters of flame and paraded daily to strains of martial music, and to the gynecologists ought to belong the glad acclaim, Io Triumphe!

Gentlemen, I think no conscientious physician could accept the control of an insane asylum without making most direct and earnest efforts to encompass the science of gynecology or strenuously straining to perfection therein, however distant the goal.

Now please don't think that I have prolapsus mentis, if you will pardon me, or that I confuse it with prolapsus uteri. With regard to my frail form there are both geographical and sexual distinctions. Don't imagine that I consider that every sandbagged man or woman has seminal weakness or a lacerated cervix.

Please accept that I recognize multivarious causes of insanity, and that each cause has protean prerogatives.

Please accept that in my blissful ignorance I often denominate insanity idiopathic, idiopathic! My eternal gratitude to the genius that coined that word. It has no peer in impressing the laity,

solacing our conscience and masking our professional ignorance under a gaudy glamour.

Pain in the mind (again asking your pardon) often originates from pain in the womb and an aberrant mind from an aberrant womb.

Anvia-phobia does not always spring from reading terrorizing literature on lost manhood. Take a man who has not had access to these reprehensible advertisements (his name is Robinson Crusoe, or he lives in Deaf Smith county), let him have frequent nocturnal pollutions with matutinal malaise headache and symptoms congenerous, let him see in his urine daily the milky way of spermato- or prostatorrhoea, let there be slight perineal heaviness, inguinal uneasiness and lumbar pains, he will, without special training, suspect a diminution of virility; he will become hypochondriacal and morbid, is ready to manufacture mountains out of mole hills and is a ready prey and soft-snap for these aborted spermatozoa sharps who advertise as lost manhood restorers.

What mystical physical and psychical laws are operating by unseen force.

Why is hope the paramount microbe or sprite of Pandora's tubercular chest, lifting, cheering, soothing, even brightening, the smile of death?

Why does despair so gloom secondary syphilis in those who know not its loathsomenes and dread not its terrors?

One mind, one body equal one mechanism. Is this sympathy conveyed by blood current or nerve spark? Pray for light, but work however dim the lamp. If the blood current, furnishing the pabulum, either food or fuel to the brain is vitiated by the secretion of any diseased organ, why should not the mind, the tenant of the brain, be endangered as to its integrity, acutely or chronically as is the disease?

It may be that the ancient Greeks were correct in selecting the liver as the seat of the affections and home of the soul, instead of the heart or the mind. We know that valvular disease does not restrict amiability and that an old hepatic cuss is always persona non grata.

I am afraid you will think that I imprison or house the soul in the prostate or the semen factory and its reservoir, and that I administer prostatine for religious mania. This fact is indisputable: that in every slight discharge of follicular prostatitis you will always find that mental depression is a feature of the disease out of all proportion to its gravity.

I have seen the clavus-nape tenderness and intercostal neuralgia and epilepsy (probably hysterical) and other reflex phenomena cured by pessary-perineal repair and pessary-shortening round ligaments or suspension-cervical repair, and so on, embracing the adnexa.

I have seen asylum life averted by this same attention to the female and by operation for varicocele and measures addressed to post-urethral adnexa in the male.

Excision of the varicosed dorsal vein of the penis has converted many a misogynist into a gay cavalier, a gynuephobic or woman shunner into a Lothario. The dull, shrinking chrysalis is a gaudy butterfly on parade.

I am stating simply my belief founded on the rock or sand of my experience.

I have avoided opening up the interstices of the subject, but will ask, in closing, why a woman of sound mind with genital disease is operated on with avidity while her insane sister in identical condition is nearly always gynecologically abandoned?

ADDENDUM.

The assertion made by Fliess in 1897 (Vienna Clinical Weekly) of a close relation between the nasal mucous membrane and the genital organs in women seems to be corroborated by Schiff, of Venice, who undertook in sceptical spirit the investigation of the subject. Schiff found genital spots on the inferior turbinated and nasal septum. It was found possible to relieve the dysmenorrhoeic pains in the loins and abdomen by applying cocaine to the nasal spots and entirely cure by cauterization of the region.

The well known vicarious epistaxis of amenorrhoea proves a relationship between the genital organs and the nose.

Kovlack in amenorrhoea finds onanism of etiologic moment. He maintains that positive signs of onanism were found in painful hypertrophy of the left lobe of the thyroid gland and swelling of certain parts of the nasal mucous membrane. He cauterized the nose in eight cases with five successes.

Suggestion was thoroughly ruled out in these experiments.