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Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939

"Sexual Inversion"

Therefore your best plan will be to go with a
prostitute. Should you do this, however, you will probably pick
up a beastly disease. Therefore the safest way would be to do it
abroad if you get the chance, for there the houses are licensed.'
Having delivered himself of this advice he troubled himself no
further in the matter, but left me to work out my own destiny.
The great physician, to whom I was taken about this time, also
gave me his advice on this point. 'Masturbation,' he said, 'is
death. A number of young men come to me with the same story. I
tell them they are killing themselves, and you will kill
yourself, too.' The doctor's hope was apparently to frighten his
young patients into what he conceived to be natural conditions of
life, and one went away from him with the impression that every
sexual manifestation in one's self was a physical infirmity, due
to one's own moral weakness. It took me some time before I could
make up my mind to follow my father's advice, but after a period
of real moral agony I deliberately and entirely in cold blood
acted upon it.


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