Page:Contraception; 1st ed. (IA in.ernet.dli.2015.94163).pdf/97

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CHAPTER FIVE

and his emotions and reflex actions at their freest, he is called upon to exercise careful watchfulness and critical control from the central nervous system. The strain is very great even if successfully accomplished. In addition to this the local effect on his own organ is harmful, because at the time of ejaculation the surrounding gentle support and the general soothing influence of vaginal enclosure and contact are absent. The evil effect on individual men is sometimes so great as to destroy the general health and make them thoroughly nervous and run-down, or to induce more explicit symptoms of neurasthenia and even functional disorders.

On the woman the effect is harmful if she is of a nervous disposition owing to anticipatory fears of failure. Where this is not so and the woman' is placid and satisfied in this respect, it is nevertheless harmful because she is deprived of the full benefit of union. She is in a position comparable in this respect with that of the wife of a man suffering from too hasty ejaculation, of whom Porosz noted that such a woman may suffer neurasthenia even approaching insanity, and be cured when her husband was cured, as she needed the

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