The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- But Did She Stop Masturbating? -- (Chapter VIII, Part 25)

Now, having already made a charlie of himself a decade earlier, you'd think Freud would have learned his lesson about cocaine.

On the contrary, he had a lingering fascination with the drug, compounded by his lifelong inability to admit mistakes, ruining at least one more life in the process.

In 1895, he diagnosed a female patient as suffering from Fliess' made-up disease, supposedly caused by masturbation.

A myth with legs:
reminiscent of Fliess' theory that the nose contains 'genital spots',
this 'nasal delivery technology' was supposed to boost your sex life --
before the UK authorities banned the ads for being 'crass'
Getty Images

The two doctors decided that Fliess had to come to Vienna to remove a bone in the thirty-year-old's nasal cavity.

The problem was, Fliess didn't have much surgical experience.

So if you're squeamish, look away now…

Considering that Emma Eckstein underwent completely unnecessary, life-threatening surgery at the hands of an inexperienced quack, it's not all that surprising that the patient developed problems soon after Fliess had left Vienna.

She was in severe pain, hemorrhaging repeatedly and secreting a noxious fluid.

Oh—and her head started to emit a 'fetid odor,' as Freud recounted later in a letter to Fliess.

Partners in crime: Freud and Fliess in the 1890s

After she'd already been suffering for two weeks, Freud finally called in another surgeon friend who cleaned the wound, 'removed some sticky blood clots, and suddenly pulled at something like a thread, (and) kept on pulling. Before either of us had time to think, at least half a meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse.'

'I felt sick,' Freud continued—no doubt at the sight of his career dying before his eyes—and admitted that he had to leave the room.

While the surgeon battled to stop the hemorrhaging, Freud had a cognac to recover to his default position and blame somebody else: not his dear friend Fliess, who had carelessly left nearly two feet of gauze up the patient's nose, but the subsequent surgeon who'd actually saved the woman's life.

'He should immediately have thought, There is something inside; I shall not pull it out lest there be a hemorrhage,' Freud claimed.

Remarkably, the poor patient had remained conscious during the ordeal.

'When I returned to the room somewhat shaky,' the doctor reported with typical self-regard, 'she greeted me with the condescending remark, "So this is the strong sex."'

The redoubtable woman underwent further surgery and wound up permanently disfigured.

Despite all this, Freud continued to swear by his friend—and claim that in actuality it was the woman's hysteria that caused her to hemorrhage to 'entice' Freud to pay attention to her.

For his part, Fliess went on to publish a monograph on The Relations Between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs from the Biological Aspect.

One reviewer, noting Fliess' claim that diseased tonsils made children cross-eyed, condemned the book as 'disgusting gobbledygook:'

'In not a few places the reader has the impression that the author is making fun of him.'