Med.Hist.(2013),vol.57(4),pp.537–558.c The Author2013.Published by Cambridge University Press2013 doi:10.1017/mdh.2013.38
Tom Tiddler’s Ground:Irregular Medical Practitioners and Male Sexual Problems in New Zealand,
1858–1908
LINDSAY R.WATSON∗
36Reid Crescent,Allenton,Ashburton,7700,New Zealand
Abstract:Irregular practitioners(‘quacks’)specialising in male
xual problems succeeded in nineteenth-century New Zealand by
taking advantage of the growing population of unattached men who were
ignorant of their own xual physiology.The irregulars also profited
from the regular practitioners’acceptance of ill-defined or imaginary
male xual disorders and the side effects of conventional venereal
dia treatments,the lack of a clear demarcation between quacks
and the regular medical profession,and an incread availability of
newspaper advertising.Improvements in the postal system enabled
quacks to reach more potential customers by mail,their preferred sales
method.The decline in quackery resulted from scientific advances in the
understanding of dia and government legislation to privilege regular
practitioners and limit quacks’access to postal rvices and advertising.
Keywords:Sexuality,Quackery,Masturbation,Spermatorrhoea,
Electrotherapy
Introduction
New Zealand has long been a sort of Tom Tiddler’s ground for quacks of all descriptions’.1 Although
there is as yet no detailed history of irregular medical practitioners(‘quacks’)in New Zealand,it is not a completely neglectedfield.Rearchers have naturally focud on what might be called quackery’s golden age:the late nineteenth and early twentieth century –the period in which modern medicine had acquired a persuasive rhetoric but had not yet developed treatments to match.The battle between the factions leading up to the Quackery Prevention Act1908has been studied by Loui May;general quackery in thefirst two decades of the twentieth century has been investigated by Jennifer Gray;and attitudes of ∗Email address for correspondence:
I wish to thank Robert Darby,medical historian,for providing advice and encouragement,and to acknowledge the extensive u made of the National Library of New Zealand’s Paperspast website.
1The New Zealand Truth,29April1911,1.‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’refers to an ancient playground game and was the title of a short story by Charles Dickens.Apparently New Zealanders were easy pickings for quacks.
538Lindsay R.Watson
the medical profession from the perspective of women outlined by Sandra Coney.2While New Zealand quackery during the ttlement period has yet to be thoroughly investigated, it is clear that
Melbourne and Sydney quacks were the source of much New Zealand activity.The success of male xual quackery in New Zealand reflected,on a diminished scale,the Australian state of affairs.
青岛理工大学是几本A letter-writer to the British Medical Journal(BMJ)in1883explained that the vast distances and small population in Australia made preventing quackery difficult and that quackery was‘rampant’.3Quackery in the Australian colonies has been investigated and offers a similar and parallel context for appreciating the New Zealand experience. Some Australian medical histories include the activities of irregular practitioners.4Phillipa Martyr refers to‘a“golden age”of unrestricted medical practice’in Australia,emphasising the range in types of medical practitioners.5A few writers have concentrated on the attitudes to real or imagined male xual pathologies during this period.David Walker has investigated the concern of nineteenth-century Australia that men wastage might degrade the physical strength of the workforce.6Robert Darby has discusd the influence of English surgeon William Acton on the approach of Australian doctors Richard Arthur and James Beaney towards masturbation and spermatorrhoea.7Lisa Featherston concluded that,in the late nineteenth century,the Australian medical profession’s perception was that the male body could easily slip into xual excess and deviations.8
The prent discussion considers the reasons for the successful inroads of quackery into the treatm
ent of male xual complaints in New Zealand during the cond half of the nineteenth century as revealed mainly through newspaper advertising,and therefore excludes consideration of the roles played by itinerant hawkers,traditional M?ori and immigrant Chine medicine.The advance of xual quackery in New Zealand was supported by the surplus of adult men in rural districts,the acceptance and open promotion of imaginary male xual pathologies by some in the orthodox medical community,the considerable range of regulated and unregulated medical practitioners,the rapid growth of the postal system and the advent of daily newspaper advertising from the1860s.
A Potential Niche Market of Surplus Men
Much has been made of the influx of men eking gold,gum and land during New Zealand’s colonial period,the resulting x ratio that favoured males,and the role this
2Loui May,‘Medical Malversations:Quacks,the Quackery Prevention Act1908,and the Orthodox Profession’s Push for Power’(unpublished BA Hons thesis:University of Otago,1994);Jennifer M.Gray,‘Potions,Pills and Poisons:Quackery in New Zealand,circa1900–1915’(unpublished BA Hons thesis: University of Otago,1980);Camille Guy and Sandra Coney,‘Pink pills for pale people’,in Sandra Coney(ed.), Standing in the Sunshine:A History of New Zealand Women since they Won the Vote(Auckland:Viking,1993), 94–5.
春节工资怎么算3J[ohn]W[illiam],‘Springthorpe,‘Medical Registration in Australia’,BMJ,1,1162(1883),689.
4Phillippa Martyr,Paradi of Quacks:An Alternative History of Medicine in Australia(Paddington:Macleay Press,2002);Bryan Gandevia,‘A History of General Practice in Australia’Canadian Family Physician, Australian Supplement,October(1971),51–61.See also Peter Phillips’popular book Kill or Cure?(Adelaide: Rigby,1978).
5Martyr,ibid.,63.
6David Walker,‘Continence for a Nation:Seminal Loss and National Vigour’,Labour History,48(1985),1–14. 7Robert Darby,‘William Acton’s Antipodean Disciples:A Colonial Perspective on his Theories of Male Sexual (Dys)function’,Journal of the History of Sexuality,13,2(2004),171–2.
8Lisa Featherstone,‘Pathologising White Male Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Australia Through the Medical Prism of Excess and Constraint’,Australian Historical Studies,41,3(2010),337–51.
Quacks and Male Sexual Problems in New Zealand,1858–1908539 played in defining Kiwi male culture.In1861there were622Pakeha[European]females to every thousand Pakeha males,but by190
1the ratio had stabilid to900females to every thousand males.9Offtting this trend was the large proportion of young males who during the years1870–1914did not marry until they were twenty-eight to thirty years of age.10By1891two-thirds of adult men lived in rural areas.11This large and scattered population of unattached and mainly impecunious males,the majority of whom were ignorant of their xual physiology,provided a rervoir of patients for medical practitioners of all types.Suspicious of qualified doctors,whom they regarded as expensive and preoccupied with caring for society’s elite,working men were more likely to rely on non-orthodox practitioners and patent medicines supplied through local chemists or druggists.12
Dias of a‘Secret Nature’13
Before the developments of germ theory and antibiotics,medical practitioners treated real or imagined male xual dias of unclear aetiology with a variety of treatments, most of which were ineffective and many of which were dangerous.An aura of sin and shame surrounded symptoms related to the perceived effects of masturbation and spermatorrhoea and venereal dia.The concept that masturbation(‘lf-pollution’)was physically harmful aro in the eighteenth century in the wake of propagandist works such as the anonymous Onania(c.1716)and Samuel-Auguste Tissot’s Onanism(1758)that declared that the loss of minalfluid could lead to weakening of the intel
lect,loss of bodily strength,aches and pains,pimples,harmful effects on the genitals and intestinal disorders.14According to degenerative dia and reflex neurosis theories,moreover, excessive stimulation of the nervous system through masturbation could produce rious dia and even death.Public information about the dangers of masturbation was available during the1860s through R.and L.Perry’s The Silent Friend.15This publication, written by two London surgeons who exhibited quack-like characteristics and who were described as‘pernicious to the welfare of society’,was available to New Zealand men via mail order from Sydney.16Any normal male reading their sixty-five page ction on masturbation would be convinced that his xual physiology was quite abnormal.
In thefirst place the nervous system of the masturbator becomes impaired,the brain,the heart,the lungs become impoverished,and hence ari melancholy,impotence,a bewildered mind,nervousness,and a general decay of the system.‘Tis then that the truthflashes across the mind,and the mirable victim of the folly becomes aware of the extreme wretchedness of his situation,and that he is no longer afit object for society;a complete imbecile,incapable of xual intercour;a man only in form,but not in substance,without the power of exercising his functions either of mind or body:the former participating in 9Jock Phillips,A Man’s Country?The Image of the Pakeha Male,a History(Auckland:Penguin,1987),7–8. 10Ibid.,10.
11Phillips,op.cit.(note9),10.
12Guy and Coney,op.cit.(note2);Gandevia,op.cit.(note4).In New Zealand,the terms chemist and druggist interchangeably from the1840s;the term druggist disappeared by the mid-twentieth century.The term apothecary added veracity to a few newspaper advertiments until the1870s.
13The North Otago Times,25August1864,1.
14Samuel-Auguste Tissot,Onanism:Or a Treati on the Dias Produced by Masturbation(1758)cited in Robert Darby,A Surgical Temptation–The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Ri of Circumcision in Britain (Chicago,IL:University of Chicago Press,2005),52.
15R.Perry and L.Perry,The Silent Friend(London:R.&L.Perry&Co,1847).
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16The Daily Southern Cross,6April1858,4;Edward B.Bowman,Medical Fallacies and Rational Medicine (Sydney:Clarson,Shallard&Co.,1864),7.
540Lindsay R.Watson
the dia,become morbidly affected,and distrust,fear,extreme nsitiveness,and frequently madness ensue.17
As the nineteenth century progresd the medical concern over masturbation became more widespread.Concern reached a peak in1899when twelve per cent of the men in New Zealand asylums were declared insane due to lf-abu.18
The term spermatorrhoea referred to discharge of men that was not the result of the only rightful Victorian xual activity,procreative intercour.Claude Francois Lallemand was thefirst to document spermatorrhoea in Les Pertes Seminales Involuntaires published from1836to1842.19Symptomatically spermatorrhoea manifested as spontaneous emissions(including‘nocturnal pollutions’)or men loss during evacuations of the bladder and colon,followed by exhaustion.Dr W.H.Ranking in1843outlined a curious range of symptoms including turbid urine,an elongated prepuce,small pendulous testicles and feminisation.20Using papers he had originally published in The Lancet, John Laws Milton produced a book on spermatorrhoea in1864.21Surgeons generally considered spermatorrhoea a widespread and genuine dia until the1870s and treatments included purgatives,anal leeches,diuretics,laxatives,enemas,suppositories, penile rings coated with chemical irritants and cauterisation.22The infamous Melbourne surgeon and specialist in xual dias James George Beaney promoted the concept of spermatorrhoea in Australasia with his book Spermatorrhoea,in its Physiological, Medical,and Legal Aspects,which for
New Zealand clients was available from H. Wi of Dunedin in the1880s.23Self-appointed spermatorrhoea experts advid that one nocturnal emission every ten days or two weeks was harmless,although Philip Muskett of Sydney Hospital allowed up to two per week.Muskett warned that a man suffering from spermatorrhoea should go to an‘accredited and reputable physician’.
If he persists in going elwhere,instead,he willfind that his anxiety of mind will be traded upon,that his condition has not been benefited in the slightest degree,and he has been drained of all the money he possd.24
Darby argues that before circumcision became fashionable in the1890s there was little the regular practitioners could offer in advance of the quacks to cure masturbation and spermatorrhoea.Removing the foreskin eliminated its stimulatory gliding motion,avoided 17Perry and Perry,op.cit.(note15),IX–X.
18‘Reports on Lunatic Asylums of the Colony’and‘Reports on Mental Hospitals of the Dominion’,Appendices to the Journals of the Hou of Reprentatives of New Zealand,Section H(1880–1920).From1879to1919 the mean incidence of insanity due to masturbation within New Zealand male inmates was approximatelyfive per cent.
19Darby,op.cit.(note14),181.
20W.H.Ranking,‘Obrvations on Spermatorrhœa;or the Involuntary Discharge of the Seminal Fluid’, Provincial Medical Journal and Retrospect of the Medical Sciences,162(1843),93–5.
21John Laws Milton,On Spermatorrhoea and its Complications(London:Robert Hardwicke,1864).账怎么组词
22Ellen Bayuk Ronman,Unauthorized Pleasures:Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience(Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press,2003),19,26.
23Darby,‘Antipodean Disciples’,op.cit.(note7),171–2;The Otago Witness,15June1872,22;James George Beaney also wrote Syphilis,Its Nature and Diffusion Popularly Considered(Melbourne:George Robertson, 1870),which may be a paraphra of an earlier German work,and The Generative System and its Functions in Health and Dia(Melbourne:F.F.Bailli`e re,1872).See Phillips,op.cit.(note4),114.
24Phillip E.Muskett,Illustrated Medical Guide,New Zealand Edition(Sydney:William Brooks,1903),203, 206.Although in conflict with religion,some physicians prescribed masturbation becau they believed dia would result if men did not evacuate men regularly.See Patrick Sin买食品
gy,‘The History of Masturbation:An Essay Review’,Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences,59(2004),112–21.
Quacks and Male Sexual Problems in New Zealand,1858–1908541 the accumulation of irritants and reduced the nsitivity of the remaining organ.The infamous Australasian quacks Howard Freeman and Richard Wallace,who advertid in New Zealand from Sydney and Melbourne late in the century,often ud milder remedies and recommended against circumcision,even for phimosis.25
The abnce of safe and effective treatments,and the embarrassment for men suffering from gonorrhoeal or syphilitic infections,provided other potential prospects for quackery. The Perrys recommended bathing syphilitic chancres in an antiptic solution of aqueous camphor and copper sulfate.For more rious symptoms they recommended mercurial ointment mixed with‘extract of lead’.26They obrved that‘[t]housands are annually either mercurialized out of existence,or their constitutions so broken and the functions of nature so impaired,as to render the residue of life mirable’.27Such side effects offered more opportunities for irregular medical entrepreneurship.
‘A Dangerous Class of Impostors’28
诗词名句Before the dominance of health care by the medical profession in the twentieth century, ailing New Z
ealand men could choo from a range of irregular providers that included ‘herbalists,masurs,hydrotherapists,osteopaths,electrical therapists or galvanists and hypnotherapists’.29To attempt to classify the medical practitioners either as quacks or regular physicians and surgeons is to assume a fal dichotomy–a social construct that results from focusing solely on either end of the practitioner spectrum.30The orthodox medical profession consisted of the practically trained surgeons who status‘ranged widely from that of high respectability to criminality’and the more academically trained physicians.31Surgeons,rather than physicians,treated venereal dias.Ellen Bayuk Ronman says‘[t]he struggle between quacks and surgeons is a complicated one to analyze with hindsight,since we now realize that,to put it bluntly,surgeons did not know what they were doing either’.32In the1860s Edward B.Bowman obrved that quackery ‘pervades the ranks of the profession,and may be recognid by tricks of the outer garment and affectations’.33Registered doctors commonly ud poisonous herbal preparations such as aconite(as an antipyretic or analgesic),toxic elements such as arnic and injected the urethra with caustic substances.34For the purpos of this discussion it is uful to divide nineteenth-century medical practitioners(ns lat)into three class:(1)registered and trained physicians and surgeons;(2)unregistered(or deregistered)practitioners with at least some medical,pharmacological or herbalist knowledge and training;and(3)the 25Robert Darby,‘Australia:A
New Britannia in Another World’,History of Circumcision,available online at www.historyofcircumcision/index.php?option=com content&task=category§ionid=6&id=71& Itemid=50(accesd11March2012).For a comprehensive account of the u of circumcision to treat masturbation in nineteenth century Britain,e Darby,op.cit.(note14).
26Perry and Perry,op.cit.(note15),155–6.Both camphor and copper sulfate have antibacterial properties.
27Perry and Perry,op.cit.(note15),163–4.每日早安心语
28‘The White Cross League and Quackery’,The Lancet,157,4042(1901),492.
29Guy and Coney,op.cit.(note2).
30W.F.Bynum and Roy Porter(eds),Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy,1750–1850(London:Routledge, Kegan&Paul,1987),1.
31Ronman,op.cit.(note22),30.
32Ronman,op.cit.(note22),33.
形容雪大的句子
33Bowman,op.cit.(note16),18.
34Quackery Prevention Bill,The New Zealand Parliamentary Debates,144(1908),26;Darby,op.cit.(note25).
