L’Onanisme. Dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation . . . troisième édition, considérablement augmentée.
Paris: Chez Didot le Jeune, 1765. Stated third edition; a third edition was also published by Chapuis in 1764. 12mo (7.38 x 4.5 inches), original pasteboard laced case over leather strap supports, xxi, [1], 264 pages, untrimmed. Ink autograph titling to the spine. Some general light spotting and foxing and minor soiling; a very good copy in what less scrupulous booksellers might term excessively original condition. Item #22434
“Je me suis proposé d’écrire des maladies produites par la masturbation, & non point du crime de la masturbation; n’est-ce pas d’ailleurs assez en prouver le crime, que de démontrer qu’elle est un acte de suicide?” Textual ground zero for the supposed epidemic of masturbatory disease and perhaps the foremost medical best-seller of the 18th century, first published in Latin in 1758 as an appended essay to his work on bilious fever, Dissertatio de febribus biliosis (Lausanne, 1758) and by 1760 issued separately in a French translation by Tissot himself; Lequeur notes “There is no complete, systematic bibliography. But we know about scores of eighteenth-century editions.” This enlarged third edition (Tissot notes in the preface that the work has grown by about a third since his 1760 edition) was first issued by Chapuis with a 1764 publication date and followed by this and a subsequent 1766 version of that third edition; an edition published in Paris with the imprint of Didot le jeune also appeared in 1765. Tissot’s Onanisme is in part an answer to the excesses of the English popular work, Onania, which Tissot criticizes; the work here is a somewhat tenuous argument against self-abuse built largely on several centuries of case studies suggesting the physical toll of excessive venery. The incomparable Michael deHartington’s gloss on Tissot in the 2006 Burton Weiss catalog, Onanism: The masturbation panic 1756-1973, in writing specifically of this Didot edition, “The Swiss doctor, Samuel Tissot, was responsible for hijacking the phenomenon from the confessional to the consulting-room. . . . In fairness to Tissot, quite a good egg and on good terms with Rousseau who admired his thesis and with Voltaire who did not, the treatise sat unregarded at the end of the author’s De feribus biliosis (Lausanne, 1758) until, after the manner of a pop record’s unconsidered b-side, it swept to popular acclaim, leaving the lead thesis more or less forgotten. Without Tissot, we might have escaped the whole business.” See also Laqueur, Thomas W. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York 2003) and Stengers, Jean and Anne Van Neck (Kathryn Hoffmann, trans.). Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (New York, 2001).
Price: $1,250.00