Case XXIX: An Unlawful Remedy

A certain woman comes to a confessor and, among other things, confesses that she permitted something dishonorable—namely, intercourse—to a young man for whom this remedy had been prescribed by a physician to cure an illness. What must be said?

It is immediately apparent that such a remedy is entirely unlawful and can neither be prescribed by a physician nor employed by anyone. Therefore, if a physician had enjoined it during illness upon that young man, for whom it was impossible to enter marriage, the young man ought to follow the example of blessed Casimir, Confessor, of whom it is related in the Breviary on March 4: “At the very end of life he courageously maintained his virginity, while, oppressed by grave illness, he steadfastly resolved to die rather than, on the advice of physicians, undergo the loss of chastity.”

Moreover, this advice of the physician seems deserving of rejection, since physicians at the present time generally do not concede that such a remedy can be necessary. In the Middle Ages, indeed, such an opinion prevailed, as writers report, but it had flowed into the schools of physicians from the books of ancient pagan and Arab physicians; now a sounder doctrine has succeeded it, as is sufficiently apparent from the matters discussed by the distinguished Stöhr (Pastoral-Medicine, IV, page 262 and following), who says among other things: “ If I add that the very physicians, who were so little concerned with Christian ethics that they believed themselves able to quench the fire of passion by means of the trivial drugs at their disposal, did not hesitate to recommend sexual intercourse as a remedy for various diseases, this fact alone is enough to reveal the true character of the cynicism that dominated medieval medicine.”