Some Important Information From The Past

"For young men [in the 19th century], the great anxiety was masturbation, a term coined in a British medical journal in 1766 in an article entitled 'Onanism: A Treatise on the Disorders Produced by Masturbation.'  The origins of the term are puzzling.  The Oxford English Dictionary says that it comes from the Latin masturbari, but then calls that term of 'unkn. origin."  The verb form masturbate didn't arise until 1857, but by that time the world had come up with any number of worrisome-sounding alternatives - selfish celibacy, solitary licentiousness, solitary vice, self-abuse, personal uncleanliness, self-pollution, and the thunderous crime against nature.  By whatever name it went, there was no question that indulgence in it would leave you a juddering wreck.  According to Dr. William Alcott's A Young Man's Guide (1840), those who succumbed to temptation could confidently expect to experience, in succession, epilepsy, St. Vitus' Dance, palsy, blindness, consumption, apoplexy, 'a sensation of ants crawling from the head down along the spine,' and finally death.

As late as 1913 the American Medical Association published a book that explained that spermin, a constituent of semen, was necessary for the building of strong muscles and a well-ordered brain, and that boys who wasted this precious biological elixir would turn from 'hard-muscled, fiery-eyed, resourceful young men' into 'narrow-chested, flabby-muscled mollycoddle.'"

From Bill Bryson's delightful Made In America, An Informal History of the English Language in the United States.  You can find it here or really your favorite bookstore.