reminder to degenerates

Masturbators are troubled by miserable fancies that their letters are opened and read by unknown parties before coming to hand; that every one who meets them sees in their countenances the effects of their habits, or is aware in some mysterious way of their ill-practices.

Others say that the blood rushes to their face whenever a casual eye meets them in the street, frequently accompanied by perspiration, and that the eyes are involuntarily cast down, as though they had been suddenly detected in some guilty act; that their conversation becomes disconnected, and their observation desultory; that they loose all their relish for pursuits which formerly interested them to the highest degree; that they envy every one they see; fancy there is nothing left for them in the world, either of utility or pleasure; that they have become aimless and purposeless, and that all they can do is to drag on a miserable existence till the tomb closes over them.

The sufferer from this vice becomes listless, inattentive, indifferent. There is an inability to concentrate the mind, or apply it with any degree of vigor; want of interest in friends; loss of self-control; failure of memory, and difficulty of conducting conversation. The reasoning is disconnected, and oftentimes the mental powers entirely fail; the victim becomes diffident, bashful, and ashamed, and seldom looks people in the face. His love of books is lost, history becomes a blank, the glowing pages of romance charm no more, the poet’s spell hath lost its power, music’s witchery is dead, the beauties of art are passed unheeded by, the loveliest landscape is but an arid desert, and nature’s most sublime endeavors fail to arouse the soul of him who has long been contaminated by this loathsome vice of masturbation.

A way out of financial difficulty arose when Kahn became aware of the activities of a group offering cures for venereal disease under the name of Perry and Co, though the name of the family was Jordan. Unlike regular medical practitioners, these ‘self-created MDs’ advertised widely in places such as public urinals and sold cures through the post. Mr Sexton, a lecturer employed by Kahn, would criticize ‘in a virulent manner’ the business of Perry and Co, who, with a view to stopping these attacks, gave Kahn orders for anatomical models. The profit from the sale of these models enabled Kahn to keep his museum open. Later, seeing an opportunity to turn bad publicity into good, the Jordans persuaded Kahn to go into business with them. The collaboration proved a financially successful one. Kahn's museum, which transferred to the Salle Robin at 232 Piccadilly, offered an opportunity for lecturers to talk publicly about the all but unmentionable subject of venereal disease. Visitors might have recognized the signs of disease in themselves after seeing the ulcers and eruptions modelled in wax, or, more likely, they might have feared themselves infected. A book, The Shoals and Quicksands of Youth, was discretely sold to them.14 Though ostensibly written by Kahn, this account of the venereal diseases was a re-working of Perry and Company's lurid self-published tract The Silent Friend, through which they advertised their treatments. Clients could then consult a ‘doctor’ on the premises, or correspond, anonymously, from home. Men reluctant to approach a regular practitioner used the museum as, in effect, a walk-in venereal disease clinic; in time it became little more than a front to sell pamphlets and medicines, principally to the worried well. Kahn became a wealthy man; he rented a large house in Harley Street, furnished it lavishly, kept a carriage and pair, and rode in the park. This nouveau riche lifestyle drew the attention of the medical press to his business: the museum, wrote his critics, was a form of self-advertisement, and the cures offered there were mere quackery. In the mid 1850s, Kahn became a target of a vitriolic anti-quackery campaign orchestrated by several medical journals, which made it their business to expose ‘the gang of vile Jew Quacks’.15

Kahn and his associates were accused of peddling bogus cures and treating imaginary diseases; relying on the natural reluctance of ‘sexual hypochondriacs’ to complain publicly, and of threatening to expose patients as masturbators or fornicators if they went to law.16 In the Lancet, Wakley attacked Kahn personally, claiming he had: ‘no qualification to practice in England—if he possesses any at all...’.17 In this, Wakley appears to have been correct; there is no evidence that Kahn had ever taken a degree, though while in England he styled himself an MD of Vienna. In August 1857, a county court action was brought against Kahn for extortion. The plaintiff recovered £20 that he had paid for ‘improper’ treatments after complaining of having ‘clap’ and being diagnosed with spermatorrhoea. Kahn and his confederates capitalized on the medical profession's success in pathologizing male sexuality by trading on anxieties over ill-defined conditions such as spermatorrhoea and nervous exhaustion, but they did not invent them.18 Medical experts for the plaintiff accepted spermatorrhoea as a diagnosis but disagreed over its treatment. The case ruined Kahn's professional reputation by publicizing his association with ‘advertising quacks’. He became ‘such a negative in the medical profession’, quipped Punch, that he was considering changing his name to ‘can't’. In its report of the trial, the Lancet castigated Kahn's museum as an ‘obscene and disgusting’ display, ‘totally unfit for general exhibition’. Later in the year, when Lord Campbell's Obscene Publications Act became law, the Lancet suggested that the museum might be prosecuted for obscenity, as were ‘filthy books’.19