Abraham Jacobi on Masturbation in Children

Abstract

Recently while conducting research on the father of American pediatrics, Dr Abraham Jacobi, I came upon an entire chapter in his Collectanea Jacobi, entitled "Masturbation and Hysteria in Young Children." His concern with the subject and its profound affect on the youth of his day was revealing. Masturbation at the turn of the century was believed not only to promote physical and moral weakness, but also was believed to be a major cause of multiple neuroses. Today, we attribute masturbation to a normal precursor of object-related sexual behavior that occurs in nearly all men and three quarters of women.1 Self-stimulation is a common event in infancy and just as the infant explores the remainder of its body, so does it explore its genitalia. However today, even as in Jacobi's time, such experiences are often strewn with guilt and ridicule. Jacobi wrote the following: "It is this habit of masturbation in the infant and child, to which I here desire to draw attention. To what extent it is practised (sic) in more advanced years, and how it interferes with a robust physical, mental and moral development of adolescence is but too well known to both physician and pedagogue. But it has often appeared to me that its frequent occurrence in the quite young is by no means fully appreciated ... The causes of masturbation, no matter whether considered as an acquired habit or disease, are very serious indeed. I have positive knowledge of cases in which the habit was contracted by the treatment of infants, both male and female, at the hands of nurses on servants" (sic).