A Treatise on the Crime of Onan

This is one of the most notorious medical texts of the Enlightenment, an earnest 18th-century treatise that diagnosed a national health crisis. Samuel Auguste David Tissot, a respected Swiss physician, argued with complete clinical conviction that "self-pollution" was draining men of their vitality, their intellect, and their moral fiber. Drawing on case studies and classical references, he detailed a frightening cascade of symptoms from nervousness to blindness to madness, all caused by this solitary vice. The book reads as both medical warning and moral sermon, reflecting an era when physicians believed they could quantify the dangers of pleasure itself. Today it stands as a fascinating historical artifact, less for what it got wrong about the body and more for what it reveals about an age terrified of its own desires. For readers curious about the origins of modern sexual anxiety, or anyone who wants to understand how medicine and morality became tangled in the Western imagination.