A ‘Remedy that cures any person of the losing of their seed in sleep’: Ambiguous Understandings and Responses to Nocturnal Emissions 1600-1780.

In June of 1650 Thomas Willis, a physician in Oxford treated a ‘A young man of good birth’ for ‘nocturnal pollutions and involuntary ejaculations of semen’. This twenty-five-year-old was not alone in seeking help for uncontrolled nightly emissions. This article underlines the relative ambiguity with which such emissions were discussed in printed medical works. Medical literature acknowledged the existence of nocturnal emissions but rarely addressed such seepages in detail as a specific medical condition. Further abstruseness about the nature of the condition is evident in the overlapping, and sometimes conflation, of the disease with other conditions like running of the reins and venereal disease. Secondly, this article emphasises that this ambiguity permeated the discussions and descriptions of treatment. While a body of treatments specifically for nocturnal emissions is evident in published medical works and botanical treatises, treatment was often ambiguously defined, with men being treated for a range of interrelated or unspecified seepages from the body. The flexibility inherent in these categories and their overlapping treatments potentially allowed men suffering from venereal disease to seek treatment for their stigmatised condition, also characterised by flows of discharge and semen from the body, by utilising remedies designed to restrain unwanted nighttime emissions.