ABSTRACT
The history of flagellation would be incomplete A without some notice of the practice of whipping inflicted or received by persons of both sexes as a pleasurable sensation, which has at many periods of history been manifested, and which has been incidentally noticed and commented on in previous parts of this work. It is impossible, for obvious reasons, to enter at length into the philosophical and medical points involved in this question. Among the elements of the mania which some people have for flagellation, there appears, according to an old commentator, to be “a feeling of gratification in the pain of another, proceeding from that malignant principle which, in common with the good, is to be found in the heart of man; the close affinity between cruelty and voluptuousness, which, to the physical eye, produces sport from the ludicrous convulsions and gestures of the person under the Rod;” and, requesting the reader to study the following illustrations, that is all we need say on this part of the subject.
