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In 1760, a respected Swiss physician by the name of Samuel Tissot published an even more influential book entitled, “Onanism, or a Treatise Upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation”. The author claimed that masturbation was not only a sin and a crime, but that it was also directly responsible for many serious diseases, such as "consumption, deterioration of eyesight, disorders of digestion, impotence, and insanity." Tissot's success was spectacular. He was widely quoted as the greatest authority on the subject of masturbation, and he was universally praised as a benefactor of mankind. Within a few decades, his views became official medical doctrine. Physicians all over the Western world began to find masturbation at the root of almost every physical problem.
By 1812, when Benjamin Rush published his “Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind”, the harmful effects of masturbation were taken for granted everywhere, and their number had greatly increased. According to Rush, "onanism" caused not only insanity, but also "seminal weakness, impotence, dysury, tabes dorsalis, pulmonary consumption, dyspepsia, dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, hypochondriasis, loss of memory, manalgia, fatuity, and death."
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