What a Man of Forty-Five Ought to Know (Purity and Truth - Self and Sex Series)

[xxvi], 284, [21] pp. Burgundy cloth boards, gilt titles on spine, blind-stamped titles on front board. Hoolihan 3313: "Stall maintains that at age forty-five the majority of males experience physical and emotional changes similar to (but less radical than) the changes females undergo at the same period. Stall divides his text into two parts. In the first he discusses the physical changes that occur (e.g., greying hair, defective sight, memory lapses, diminished sexual desire, etc.), and the benefits that compensate these losses (e.g., a 'purer mind and sweeter spirit'). As a consequence of diminishing energies, Stall advises that men become more moderate in their 'social exactions,' sexual appetites, business activities, mental endeavors, etc. He devotes a chapter to 'Virility - how destroyed, how preserved,' in which he describes how to conserve 'nervous force' through diet, rest, exercise, and temperance in the use of stimulants. Some of the functional disorders attending middle age are discussed, as is the ill-advised marriage of middle-aged men to younger women, and an admonition that 'the man at forty-five determines what the man at eighty shall be' - if, by prudent living, he lasts that long. Part II is subtitled 'What a man of forty-five ought to know concerning his wife,' and describes the physical and emotional manifestations of menopause. What a man of forty-five ought to know is the companion volume to Emma Drake's What a woman of forty-five ought to know in the Self and sex series."