Inaugural Medical Dissertation on the Procreation of Male Offspring

§. LXI.

Regarding the time of day when one should engage in intercourse, as I have seen various authors diverge into different opinions, I grant my assent to Carpentarius original: "Carpentario." Pierre Charpentier (1524–1612) was a French scholar., who agrees with Hippocrates. For he says in the cited passage: Intercourse should take place a sufficiently long time after food, while the stomach is fasting and empty; lest, while we strive for the species, we cause harm to the individual. For a full stomach performs nothing that benefits either the body or the soul.

§. LXII.

Musitanus original: "Musitanus." Carlo Musitano (1635–1714) was an Italian priest and physician known for his works on gynecology and syphilis. discusses what posture and position the reclining couple should observe in the act itself. To the common position, where mouth is joined to mouth and breast to breast, which he regards as too lustful, he prefers and calls more fertile the "manner of beasts" This refers to the posterior position, which some historical physicians believed aided the flow of seed.. However, I judge that common position to be proper to man and more suited to his nature.

§. LXIII.

Avicenna The Persian polymath Ibn Sina (c. 980–1037), whose medical canon was a standard textbook in Europe for centuries. proposes an exceedingly easy method for fathering males. For he divided the suitable time for procreating, without regard for the male, from one menstrual cleansing to the next in this way: counting from the first day of the cleansing until the fifth, the woman procreates a male; from the fifth to the eighth, a female; from the eighth until the twelfth, again a male; and from the twelfth until the next time of cleansing, androgynes hermaphrodites. Truly, these claims rest upon a false foundation: for he posits that the blood lost in the menstrual flow is restored in the first days on the right side of the uterus, in the later days on the left, and in the final days it exists in equal quantity on both sides.

§. LXIIII.

It is pleasing to conclude this treatise on the generation of the male with the words of Charles Drelincourt original: "Caroli Drelincurtii." Charles Drelincourt (1633–1697) was a French physician to Louis XIV and a professor of anatomy., which he has in his book On the Eggs of Women.

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