Tractus de usu flagrorum in re Medica et Veneria is a 1639 treatise by Henricus Meibomius (1590-1655). The English title is A Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery. It is widely treated as the earliest printed work focused on flogging in medical and sexual contexts, gathering case-style examples rather than pure moral sermon. For historians of BDSM literature and flagellation erotica, Meibomius is a foundational citation long before modern kink vocabulary existed.
Curll, Savran, and two centuries of authority
English publisher Edmund Curll issued the work to English readers. Scholar David Savran later declared it the authoritative text on the subject for two hundred years, an extraordinary shelf life for a seventeenth-century Latin medical-sexual tract. Its blend of medical framing and venereal (sexual) use of the whip made it a reference whenever later writers discussed erotic or therapeutic flagellation.
Persecution note and English editions
Among other remarks, the author rejoices to know that when someone was found practicing flogging for sexual gratification in Germany, they would be burned alive, a reminder that early modern writing on erotic whipping could still endorse lethal persecution while cataloguing the practice. An English translation of the 1718 edition circulated as A treatise of the use of flogging in venerial affairs: also of the office of the loins and reins, made English from the Latin by a physician, with A Treatise of Hermaphrodites by Giles Jacob added; publisher E. Curll, London. Archive copies of that English line have been preserved online, including Wayback Machine captures of older hosts. For kink-history readers, De Usu Flagrorum is not a how-to and not a liberation text: it is the early print spine of Western writing on medical and sexual flogging, written under persecution-era morals, yet treated for centuries as the standard until modern sexology and SM literature took over the subject.
