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Abominable Sex: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The role sex played in abomination is rather more complicated than you might think. Humphrey Brooke was one time Censure of the Royal College of Physicians and a man who died a very successful and wealthy man in 1693. In between becoming a Bachelor of Medicine (MB) in 1646 and a Doctor of Medicine (MD) in 1659, Brooke wrote a little book on how to stay healthy, ‘A Conservatory of Health’ (1650). He was alarmed that no such book existed in English at a time when the preservation of health was rarely the remit of a Doctor. Physicians were then, as now, more likely to get involved when things got bad, rather than when everything was fine. In this book, Brooke eulogised the era’s well-trod virtues of temperance, claiming that moderation in all things was fine; including a little of what you fancy, whatever you fancy. Sex, therefore, wasfine, done in moderation and in the right way, viz. in marriage. Not only was perfectly proper sex perfectly fine, it was perfectly good. It could perk your spiritsup, rebalance your passions and improve your health. Excessive sex or impropersex, however, was bad and could lead to very bad things. I’ll let Humphrey himself explain.

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‘Its immoderation hath these damages attending it, a dissolution of strength and spirits, dulness of memory and Understanding, decay of Sight, tainture of the Breath, Diseases of the Nerves and Joynts, as Palsies and all kinds of Gowts, weakness of the back, involuntary flux of Seed, Blood Urine’. (pp.187-188)

I can certainly understand the ‘weakness of back’ and ‘dissolution of strength’, and I realise I do often wear glasses- don’t we all these days- but I really don’t want to even think about the possible causes of ‘tainture of breath’; well, not for long anyway.

‘Prostitution’ by Bouge Flamand, from Pierre Dufour, Histoire de la Prostitution chez tous les peuples du monde : depuis l'antiquité la plus reculée jusqu'à nos jours, (Bruxelles: Librarie Encylopedique de Perichon  1851), Wellcome Library, London.

 Things got really ugly if your partner in this liaison was not who it should be.

‘if to immoderation is added, the base and sordid accompanying of harlots and impure Women; What follows but aConsumption of Lungs, Liver and Brain, a putrefaction and discolouration of the blood; loss of colour and Complexion; A purulent and violent Gonorrhoea, an ulceration and Rottenness of the Genitals: noysom [‘hurtful’, ‘offensive’ or‘pestilent’, according to Thomas Blount’s Glossographiaor a Dictionary, (1653)] and Malignant Knobs, swellings, Vlcers, andFistulates in the Head, Face, Feet , Groin, and other Gandulous and extreamparts of the body’ (p.188-189)

I don’t know about you, but I think that the thought of ‘Malignant Knobs’ should be enough to put anybody off. Brooke agrees, and adds other reasons to stay safe.

These, the loss of credit, the sense of sin, should me thinks be sufficient to deter all sorts of People fromthat noysom Vice which Almighty God hath cursed with so many attendant evils.’ (p.189)

I wondered why I had a bad creditrating. 

Sex is not all bad in the seventeenth century. Indeed, it can be good for your health. But when done to excess, or with the wrong women (and you notice, this is aimed at men having sex; I can only assume that the 'harlots' in question come off the same way, or worse) it becomes an abomination against God. Worse still, it becomes an abomination punished by another abomination. But here is the history part. In this era, the true focus ofabomination was sin and only sin. Other things were thought to be abominable but, according to many divines, they shouldn't be. So are these awful punishments really abominable things, or are they not? Is it that elite thought says they shouldn't be, but newly postgraduate medics and the general public thought they were regardless? I think so. Otherwise, why would the intellectual elites would bang on about what  SHOULD abominable rather than what is so much? 

My advice for anybody outthere worried about the above is, as it will always be, stay abominable.

Cited: Humphrey Brooke, Hygieinē. Ora conservatory of health. Comprized in a plain and practicall discourse uponthe six particulars necessary to mans life, viz. 1. Aire. 2. Meat and drink. 3.Motion and rest. 4. Sleep and wakefulness. 5. The excrements. 6. The passionsof the mind. With the discussion of divers questions pertinent thereunto /Compiled and published for the prevention of sickness, and prolongation of life, (London, R. W., 1650).

INTRODUCTION: Abomination, Aversion and Disgust.

Sometime between 1265 and 1274, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa Theologeae. In the Prima Secundae Partis, he placed some of Aristotle’s rather unstructured passions into a framework first suggested by Plato: the concupiscible and irascible.  To the concupiscible, or easily felt, powers he added the pairs of Love/Hate, Desire/Aversion (also Flight) or Abomination, Joy and Sorrow. If we love something, we desire it, and if we attain it, it brings joy. Conversely, if we hate something, we wish to avoid it or run away from it and if we do not do so, we feel sorrow. But if this sequence becomes difficult, the irascible passions move in to help us struggle. To help us attain what we desire we use hope and courage, and the route from aversion to sorrow becomes littered desperation, fear and anger. These passions are clear; they are seemingly obvious to us, they use words we understand to this day in a structure that remained dominant for centuries. But there is  one exception to this otherwise clear set of emotional labels: what on Earth is aversion or abomination? Aquinas used these descriptive terms because he didn’t really know what to call it; he wasn’t quite sure what it was, only that there was some type of 'opposite to desire' and involved avoiding evil, or that which we think can harm us. These two terms, aversion (or flight) and abomination, describe its properties: the first describes our reaction, the effects of the passion, the avoiding of the evil. The second, abomination, describes the properties of the object that causes the passion, the evil itself, and the feeling we get on sensing this evil. As with anything not nailed down in the world of ideas (and plenty of things that are), this passion was debated and altered and updated for centuries. Then, at some point in the late 17^th Century, a new word appeared, a word describing something similar to aversion/abomination, but not exactly the same. This new word, borrowed from French, seemed to fit; it seemed to work to simplify this complex passion; it seemed to finally give it a name. That name was Disgust.

I am Richard Firth-Godbehere, The Abominable History Man, and I have decided to make it my life’s work, using history, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and anything else I need, to find out how these passions were understood, described and felt  and what influence they had throughout history up to the present day. My main, initial, focus is the early modern period in Europe, but that net will widen. In this blog, I will be sharing what was thought abominable, detestable, and what caused flight, aversion and eschewing, as I research into the deeper understandings of aversion, abomination and disgust in mind and body. The hard stuff, the deep stuff, the working out, will go into my thesis. The fun extras, I want to share with you here.