Samuel-Auguste Tissot Explained

Samuel Auguste Tissot
Birth Date:20 March 1728
Birth Place:Grancy
Death Place:Lausanne
Nationality:Swiss
Field:medicine

Samuel Auguste André David Tissot (in French tiso/; 20 March 1728 – 13 June 1797) was a notable 18th-century Swiss physician.

Life

A well-reputed Calvinist Protestant neurologist, physician, professor and Vatican adviser,[1] Tissot practiced in the Swiss city of Lausanne. He wrote on the diseases of the poor, on masturbation, on the diseases of men of letters and of rich people, and nervous diseases.

He devoted an 83-page chapter to the study of migraine in his Traité des nerfs et de leurs maladies (Treatise on the nerves and nervous disorders). He used his own observations and the existing medical treatises of the day. His work is considered by modern doctors as a basis for "future generations of doctors." He is also recognized as "the classical authority on migraine."[2]

L'Onanisme

In 1760, he published L'Onanisme, his own comprehensive medical treatise on the purported ill-effects of masturbation.[3] Citing case studies of young male masturbators amongst his patients in Lausanne as basis for his reasoning, Tissot argued that semen was an "essential oil" and "stimulus" that, when lost from the body in great amounts, would cause "a perceptible reduction of strength, of memory and even of reason; blurred vision, all the nervous disorders, all types of gout and rheumatism, weakening of the organs of generation, blood in the urine, disturbance of the appetite, headaches and a great number of other disorders."

His treatise was presented as a scholarly, scientific work in a time when experimental physiology was practically nonexistent. The authority with which the work was subsequently treated — Tissot's arguments were even acknowledged and echoed by Kant and Voltaire — arguably turned the perception of masturbation in Western medicine over the next two centuries into that of a debilitating illness. L'Onanisme is now regarded to have been substantially influenced by the anonymous pamphlet .[4]

Other works

Tissot's most famous work in his lifetime was Avis au peuple sur sa santé (1761), arguably the greatest medical best-seller of the eighteenth century.[5]

On 1 April 1787, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to Dr. Tissot complimenting him on spending his “days in treating humanity” noting that his “reputation has reached even into the mountains of Corsica” and describing “the respect I have for your works…"[6]

Major works

References

Notes and References

  1. Patton. Michael S.. Twentieth-century attitudes toward masturbation. Journal of Religion and Health. December 1986. 25. 4. 291–302. 10.1007/BF01534067. 24301692. 2994906.
  2. K. Karbowski, (1986, April). Samuel Auguste Tissot His research on migraine, Journal of Neurology, Volume 233, Number 2, ISSN 0340-5354 (Print) 1432-1459 (Online), Pages 123-125
  3. P. Singy, "Friction of the Genitals and Secularization of Morality," Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 12 (2003):345-64. T. Laqueur, Solitary Sex (Zone Books, 2003).
  4. Stolberg. Michael. January–April 2000. Self-Pollution, Moral Reform, and the Venereal Trade: Notes on the Sources and Historical Context of Onania (1716). Journal of the History of Sexuality. 9, No. 1/2. 1/2. 37–61. 3704631.
  5. Singy . P. . 2010 . The Popularization of Medicine in the Eighteenth Century: Writing, Reading, and Rewriting Samuel Auguste Tissot's Avis au peuple sur sa santé . Journal of Modern History . 82 . 4. 769–800 . 10.1086/656073 . 144274686 .
  6. Napoleon Bonaparte, "To Doctor Tissot, F.R.S." (1787), as quoted in Mason, Napoléon Inconnu, Volume I, 167; see also Napoleon Bonaparte, Letters and Documents of Napoleon, Volume I: The Rise to Power, selected and trans. John Eldred Howard (London: The Cresset Press, 1961), 17.

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