The solitary vice: The superstition that masturbation could cause mental illness

A 2001 medical-history article by James Whorton, a historian of medicine at the University of Washington, published in the Western Journal of Medicine’s “Looking Back” series. It traces the belief that masturbation causes insanity from its eighteenth-century origins through its popularization in 1830s America by Sylvester Graham, and describes Graham’s broader theory that any stimulation of the nervous system, whether from food, drink, tobacco, or sexual activity, was inherently pathological. Whorton explicitly frames the masturbation-insanity belief as a medical superstition that persisted for roughly a century. The archive cites it as the principal source for Graham’s “excitability” mechanism and his masturbation-insanity claim specifically. Bibliographic metadata (volume 175, issue 1, pages 66-68, 2001, PMID 11431412, DOI 10.1136/ewjm.175.1.66) was confirmed directly from the article’s own citation metadata (fetched from PMC) and cross-checked against the Crossref record for the DOI.