Simon-Auguste Tissot

Biography

After medical studies with the Medical college of Montpellier, it reaches the rank of doctor at the 22 years age. It turns over in Suisse and settles in Lausanne.
the beginning of its notoriety dates from the controversy on the Inoculation for which he states himself favorable in one of his works in order to fight against the epidemic S.
the celebrity starts really only with his dedicated works with the misdeeds of the Masturbation whose most famous are the onanism and the Opinion with the people on his health , which made him acquire a European reputation.
the honors accumulate quickly because the success of the work becomes European. It receives a pension of the République of Geneva, becomes member of the royal Société of London, it is requested in consultation near several sovereigns of Europe.
At the request of the emperor Joseph II, it occupies during three years the clinical pulpit of Médecine with the Université of Pavia (1780). But it returned to finish its days in Lausanne where its reputation attracted many foreigners.

" Preaching a “Alternative medicine”, primarily practical, founded on a mode of life in agreement with nature, and on remedies containing Plant S, it challenges at the same time popular medicine and the erudite medicine, which it considers too hard and interventionist. Mixing archaism and modernity, it revealed the obsession of the Miasme S, stresses the importance of the psychological Facteurs in the evolution of the diseases, and introduced the Statistiques founded on mathematical calculation to study mortality . "

He condemns inter alia the doctors who make Saignée S and recommends a series of natural ingredients & food as inter alia the Quinquina, that Tissot will regard as being the best remedy and will also suggest the Camphre and a series of other ingredients considered Anaphrodisiaque of which the Lait with the Beurre and the Vin diluted in the Eau before lying down. He will suggest other methods: to go to bed only to sleep (not to remain too a long time with the bed when one awakes) and to make exercise.

In connection with Onanisme, some quotations

“excess in the pleasures of the love does not produce only wasting diseases; it throws some time in acute diseases and always it disturbs those which depend on another cause; it very easily produces the malignity, which is not, in my opinion, which the defect of forces in nature. ”
“(…) One of my school-fellows had come in this horrible state, which he was not the Master to abstain from these abominations, even during the time of the lessons: it did not await a long time its punishment and it perishes misérablement of consumption at the end of two years. ”
“Mr. Boerhaave paints these diseases with this force and this precision which characterize all its tables. " The too great loss of seed produces lassitude, debility, the immobility, of the convulsions, the thinness, drying, of the pains in the membranes of the brain; blunt the direction, and especially the sight; give place to the dorsal consumption, indolence and various diseases which have connection with that-là." ”

Dr. Tissot belongs to a vast abstract European movement which wanted to make medicine a rigorously scientific step. Its fight baited against the masturbation is explained above all by the conviction why it is necessary to maintain the body in a certain balance. Accordingly, the masturbation leads to a fast and inevitable death by founding an imbalance between the seminal losses and the energy contributions. Its vision of the body is primarily mechanical and one finds at his place an echo of the Animal-machine of Descartes.

Excesses of Tissot make us laugh now, but one should not forget the extraordinary influence which it had on its contemporaries and the whole of the 19th century. A figure summarizes this impact: its work the onanism knew sixty-three editions between 1760 and 1905.

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