Graham held masturbation to be more dangerous than partnered sex because it could begin earlier in life, recur more often, and was fueled by fantasy rather than a real partner, a combination he argued produced a “fever pitch” of nervous stimulation whose damage passed from the brain through the whole body (Whorton 2001). He set this claim out at length in A Lecture to Young Men, on Chastity, first delivered in 1834 and reissued in further editions including a fourth in 1838. It is classified as mechanism_only: the claim rests on a posited physiological mechanism, not on any measured psychiatric or medical outcome. It is recorded as refuted rather than merely untested because the belief that masturbation causes insanity is described by medical historians as a superstition that took roughly a century to recede from psychiatric medicine after taking hold in the popular and medical literature of the 1830s (Whorton 2001), and no controlled evidence for the causal claim has ever been produced.