Samuel-Auguste Tissot

Samuel-Auguste Tissot (1728 to 1797) was an eighteenth century Swiss physician who practised in Lausanne. He wrote on the illnesses of the poor, of men of letters and of the rich, and on nervous disorders, and in his Treatise on the Nerves and their Diseases he gave migraine a chapter of some eighty pages drawn from his own observation and earlier medical writers, so that he is remembered as a classical authority on the subject. His Advice to the People on Their Health of 1761 was arguably the greatest medical best seller of its century. He is also remembered for the record of what was held and later discredited: in L'Onanisme of 1760 he argued that loss of semen through masturbation caused weakness, nervous disorders and a long list of other illnesses, a view that shaped Western medical attitudes for about two centuries and drew the notice of figures such as Kant and Voltaire. The treatise was itself influenced by the earlier anonymous pamphlet Onania.