sexual acts of these aged men. They are the equivalents of the impossible physiological act.
The annals of legal medicine distinguish, as such, exhibition of the genitals,[1] lustful handling of the genitals of children,[2] inducing them to perform manustupration of the seducer, and performing masturbation[3] or flagellation on the victim.
In this stage the intellect may still be sufficiently intact to allow avoidance of publicity and discovery, while the moral sense is too far gone to allow consideration of the moral significance of the act and resistance to the impulse. With the progress of dementia, these acts are more and more shamelessly committed. Then care on account of defective sexual power disappears, and adults also become the objects of the senile passion; but the defective sexual power necessitates equivalents for coitus. Not infrequently sodomy results, and, as Tarnowsky (op. cit., p. 77) points out, in the sexual act performed with geese, chickens, etc., the sight of the dying animal and its death-struggles at the time of coitus afford complete satisfaction. The perverse sexual acts with adults are quite as horrible, and may be explained psychologically in the same way.
Case 49, in the author’s “Text-Book of Legal Psychopathology,” second ed., p. 161, demonstrates how enormously increased sexual lust may be during the course of senile dementia. Quum senex libidinosus germanam suam filiam æmulatione motus necaret et adspectu pectoris sciosi puellæ moribundæ delectaretur.
Erotic delirium and states of satyriasis may occur, in the course of the malady, with or without maniacal episodes, as the following case shows:—
