As a remedy against the temptations of the flesh the Buddhists devised a meditation in which they imagined woman’s body as a bag of filth. Medieval ascetics viewed woman as ‘a temple built above a sewer’, and St Augustine said: ‘Woman is the gate of hell.’ If one takes these words literally many men have […]

By the way, the above stories are certainly not meant to imply that masturbation is an unhealthy form of sex. On the contrary, modern sexologists see it as a form of sperm quality control: in that way it can never become old and over-ripe. Truman Capote said the interesting thing about masturbation was that he […]

In the Middle Ages the Catholic church issued a long list of prohibitions in which all sins were described and assigned an appropriate penance. Masturbation scored high on this list, though the penalty imposed depended on age and marital and religious status. In the seventeenth century science adopted the conclusions of the church virtually without […]

Not so long ago, as I was walking round the Hermitage in St Peters­burg, I spotted among the many paintings a wonderful etching by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) depicting a nude male model in front of a curtain. The young man is undoubtedly masturbating. Commen­tators speak of an ‘academic posture in a classical attitude expressing […]

A spinal cord lesion is a traumatic injury to the spine. The consequences depend on the location and severity of the trauma. Fortunately it is a rare injury. It is estimated that the annual incidence of spinal cord injury (sci), not including those who die at the scene of the accident, is approximately 40 cases […]

‘Babies Made with Sperm from Sick Donor’ read the front-page head­lines in the Dutch daily Trouw at the end of February 2002. The report that followed these striking headlines was shocking enough! Eighteen children were found to have been artificially conceived with sperm from a donor suffering from a congenital muscular disease, which had only […]

The first recorded sperm donation that took place in a medical center was carried out with few of the ethical considerations that are man­dated in clinics today: it was performed in 1884 at Philadelphia medical school for an infertile couple. Instead of taking the sperm from the husband, the doctor chloroformed the woman, then let […]

Freezing sperm cells, cryopreservation, is important mainly to young men with testicular cancer who after removal of the affected testicle face a course of chemotherapy. Occasionally a man presents for steril­ization, while expressing the wish that his sperm be stored in advance of the procedure. Such a wish cannot be met with the normal health […]

The oldest form of assisted reproduction is artificial insemination, in which a syringe or a pipette is used to bring the sperm into close proximity with the mouth of the womb. In 1780 the Italian scientist Spallanzini was the first to do this successfully, with a bitch. In 1799 John Hunter was the first to […]

When investigating infertility one regularly encounters azoospermia, the condition where no sperm cells at all are present in the ejaculate. The number of new cases per year in the Netherlands is estimated at 300 to 400, of which two-thirds are caused by abnormalities in the production of sperm cells and about a third by a […]