Over the centuries, all manner of unspeakable inven¬tions have been patented to put a stop to it: metal mittens; little cages with
inward-pointing spikes, which a boy was supposed to wear over his private parts at night; even a device that jangled a bell in the parents' bedroom the moment a child's mattress began to shake.

Virtually every illness, mental or physical, has been blamed on it, including acne, various other skin diseases, epilepsy, bed-wetting, round shoulders, blindness, insanity, tuberculosis, asthma, rheumatism, stomach cramps, infantile paralysis, melancholy, impotence, hairy palms, rickets, "loss of vitality," hysteria and suicide. In insane asylums, there were once special wards for patients whose psychosis was supposed to have been caused by self-abuse.

Ingenious and complicated punishments have been devised to frighten peo¬ple away from it. In the early Middle Ages, when churches distributed penitential books that described every sexual misdeed and prescribed punishments for each, the greatest stress of all was laid upon masturbation. St. Thomas Aquinas considered it a greater sin than fornication.