CHI SI TOCCA MUORE - ED. MANNI

An 1830 treatise on the fatal consequences of masturbation. Sixteen watercolours, sixteen stations of the Way of the Cross of autoeroticism. 

Foreword by David Riondino.
In 1830 the anonymous director of a French juvenile prison signed the equally anonymous "Le livre sans titre" to illustrate to young people the damage of onanism, considered the source of all physical and moral evil: weakness, asthenia, sleep disorders, vomiting, hair and tooth loss, bloody discharge, asthma, fever, bone wear and tear, and finally death. Each small chapter tells of a step on this precipice towards the tomb, and is accompanied by the portrait of a boy victim of the "solitary vice", first "jeune et beau", and then increasingly weaker, emaciated, exhausted. Sixteen watercolours, sixteen stations of the cross of autoeroticism. The text is accompanied by an essay on the history of masturbation: it starts from antiquity and arrives at today's conception of this sexual behavior as fully natural and ethically legitimate, passing through the drastic condemnation of the Fathers of the Church founded on the biblical sanction of Onan, and the scientific thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when, even in the midst of the Enlightenment, the influence of Catholicism led to very bloody methods to eradicate evil, from clitoridectomy to penis amputation

Author - anonymous