Man's mission on earth! : a treatise on nervous debility and physical exhaustion, being a synopsis of lectures delivered at the Museum of Anatomy, Science and Art, 489 Sixth Avenue, New York / by L.J. Jordan.

  • Jordan, Henry J.
Date:
[1871], [©1871]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Man's mission on earth! : a treatise on nervous debility and physical exhaustion, being a synopsis of lectures delivered at the Museum of Anatomy, Science and Art, 489 Sixth Avenue, New York / by L.J. Jordan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    for it is not to be disputed that on the degree of vigor and healthy action of those organs in the parents de- pends in a great measure the health of their offspring, daily experience presents to our notice painful and not unfrequently loathsome evidence of this fact. Hence it behooves all persons, before entering into the married state, to enquire whether or not they are in such bodily health as may insure that the marriage bed shall not become a hot bed of disease, whence naught but weak and puny offspring shall be produced—living evidences of folly and brutally selfish passion, How degraded, and utterly lost to all finer feelings which alone can ennoble us, must that man be, who, knowing himself to be tainted by disease, or so debilitated by early and guilty excesses that it is next to impossible that he should give life to any but tainted and doomed progeny —doomed in the mother's womb!—yet dares to offer his polluted and shattered frame at the pure shrine of female love. To causes such as these may be traced much of the domestic uuhappiness we daily see, and many of the serious diseases under which mankind suffers from one generation to another; therefore, reader, if you still be unmarried, let us beg of you to ponder well on these truths—truths, which if you neglect now, may at some future time painfully and vividly be recalled in your own family. The fearfully abused powers of the human generative system require the most cautions treatment; our studies for many years past have been exclusively directed to