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Adolescence: ITS PSYCHOLOGY AND ITS RELATIONS TO PHYSIOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, SEX, CRIME, RELIGION AND EDUCATION - G Stanley Hall (1905)
Physicians and heath gurus also linked masturbators to inverts. Summarizing a large majority of Americans’ view, Dr. Henry Guernsey warned in his marriage manual, Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects, that excessive self-abuse made men and boys “weak, pale, and feeble in mind, while all that was manly and vigorous has gone out of them.” In short, medical professionals believed that A, habitual self-abuse made males effeminate; that B, inverts were effeminate; and that, therefore, C, men who masturbated were inverts—or would become inverts. In fact, by 1900, “masturbator” and “invert” had become interchangeable in many medicolegal texts as well as in the popular imagination. Like other boys who were known to engage in self-abuse, Henry was branded a homosexual—an invert—and so had to be crazy. It was logical. Sylvanus Stall, a Lutheran minister and self-proclaimed sexologist, summed up society’s views in 1904, the year Dr. Schmidt examined Henry:
Quote: A search in any insane asylum will show that a very large proportion of patients are made up from those who masturbate or who have syphilis. Stamp out these two evils, or rather curses, of the human race, and the supply that feeds our insane asylums, aye, and our penitentiaries, too, will become vastly lessened. Think of it! So many of the inhabitants of our prisons, asylums, and our poorhouses are composed of men and women who have offended against nature’s laws by violating their own sexual nature.
Dr. Schmidt’s very odd diagnosis of Henry’s condition—his heart was in the wrong place—seems at best a mystery and at worse quackery at its most bizarre. What Henry didn’t know was that, when Dr. Schmidt claimed that Henry’s “heart was not in the right place,” he was probably referring to an obscure article, “Ueber Herzerkrankungen bei Masturbanten” (“Concerning Heart Ailments in Masturbators”), published in 1895. Its author, Dr. G. Bachus, discussed a condition he diagnosed after treating a number of boys and men— the youngest nine, the oldest thirty-one—for habitual masturbation. Based on his examinations of his patients, Bachus postulated that, for individuals “who had masturbated a lot, enlargement of the heart sets in” and their hearts “usually stretch to the left and to the right, more seldom only to the left,” resulting in the heart not being in its original “right place.” He explained that “such an enlargement is generated by the increase and intensification of the heart’s work that arises” to replenish the body’s vigor after “frequent sexual acts.”
Dr. Schmidt may never have read Bachus’s article, but it’s safe to assume that all physicians of Schmidt’s professional standing would have been familiar with the most current texts in the basic medical specialties. He certainly would have been familiar with G. Stanley Hall’s seminal two-volume study Adolescence. The single most important book of its day on the psychology of children, Adolescence not only mentions Bachus’s concept of “the masturbator’s heart,” but in it, Hall also cited Bachus’s article and linked it to what another physician, E. C. Spitzka, called “masturbatic insanity,” a form of madness caused, he believed, by habitual masturbation. Hall also revealed that many authorities linked masturbation “in a more or less casual way with one or more of the morbid forms of sex perversion, or hold that it makes a psycho-physical soil which readily bears their dread fruit.” The phrase “morbid forms of sex perversion” undoubtedly refers to homosexuality. In other words, Hall’s Adolescence instructed thousands of physicians that masturbation leads to homosexuality, insanity, or quite often both.
When Dr. Schmidt told Henry that his “heart was not in the right place,” he seems to have been offering the boy a diagnosis based on a medical misconception. What he meant was that Henry, now twelve years old, was homosexual—or becoming one.
Henry’s father knew that Henry had been masturbating since he was six. They shared a single bed, as often happened in poverty-stricken families then, and Henry Sr. may have caught his son in the act or found evidence of it on their sheets or the boy’s clothing. He knew the police had caught the boy sneaking off to visit the night watchman. What he didn’t already know about his son’s activities, the Mission staff was all too happy to tell him. Gannon, Zink, Mahoney, and O’Hara knew he had developed some sort of relationship with John Manley and the Scanlon brothers. He had even been caught masturbating in public while he was living at the Mission. They would have known, too, about the goings-on of the other boys throughout the West Madison Street vice district and how pervasive was contact with, and succumbing to, the sexual advances of men. After all, one of the Mission’s goals was to protect them from such things. The staff would have realized that it was unlikely that Henry had somehow escaped being involved in male-male sexual liaisons on the streets, even if that activity comprised only jack-rolling episodes or sex for hire.
Everything that Henry’s father had told the doctor about Henry’s behavior was evidence that underscored Schmidt’s diagnosis, and given Schmidt’s diagnosis—based on a section of Hall’s book, that was based on Bachus’s article—it’s no wonder that both doctor and father believed the twelve-year-old boy should be locked up. Henry, they believed, had to be crazy to act as he did.
As typically happened to Henry, no one bothered to explain to him what was going on or why, but they were eager to get rid of him. Years later, he came to believe that he’d been examined by Dr. Schmidt to see if he was “feeble-minded or crazy,” and in a manner of speaking, he was absolutely right.
Unfortunately for Henry, neither Dr. Schmidt nor Henry’s father had a hint about the goings-on at the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, the place where they were about to exile him. The activities behind its walls would elicit a government probe only a few years after the “cold windy threatening” day that Henry left Chicago for the Asylum in downstate Illinois. What he would face at the Asylum was devastating, and years later, he would admit, “Had I known what was going to be done with me I surely would have ran away”— virtually the same phrase he used to reveal his reaction to his life at the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy.
Quote: Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born. The qualities of body and soul that now emerge are far newer. The child comes from and harks back to a remoter past; the adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of the race slowly become prepotent. Development is less gradual and more saltatory, suggestive of some ancient period of storm and stress when old moorings were broken and a higher level attained. The annual rate of growth jn height, weight, and strength is increased and often doubled, and even more. Important functions previously non-existent arise. Growth of parts and organs loses its former proportions, some permanently and some for a season. Some of these are still growing in old age and others are soon arrested and atrophy. The old moduli of dimensions become obsolete and old harmonies are broken. The range of individual differences and average errors in all physical measurements and all psychic tests increases. Some linger long in the childish stage and advance late or slowly, while others push on with a sudden outburst of impulsion to early maturity. Bones and muscles lead all other tissues, as if they vied with each other, and there is frequent flabbiness or tension as one or the other leads. Nature arms youth for conflict with all the resources at her command—speed, power of shoulder, biceps, back, leg, jaw, strengthens and enlarges skull, thorax, hips, makes man aggressive and prepares woman’s frame for maternity. The power of the diseases peculiar to childhood abates, and liability to the far more diseases of maturity begins, so that with liability to both it is not strange that the dawn of the ephebic day is marked at the same time by increased morbidity but diminished rates of mortality. Some disorders of arrest and defect as well as of excessive unfoldment in some function, part, or organ may tiow, after long study and controversy, be said to be established as peculiar to this period, and diseases that are distinctly school- and city-bred abound, with apparently increasing frequency. The momentum of heredity often seems insufficient to enable the child to achieve this great revolution and come to complete maturity, so that every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals. There is not only arrest, but perversion, at every stage, and hoodlumism, juvenile crime, and secret vice seem not only increasing, but develop in earlier years in every civilized land.
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