Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1899, p. 669.
The mythology of Hawaii, one may note, tells of goddesses who were impregnated by bananas they had placed beneath their garments. B. Stern mentions (Medizin in der Türkei, Bd. II, p. 24) that the women of Turkey and Egypt use the banana, as well as the cucumber, etc., for masturbation. In a poem in the Arabian Nights, also ("History of the Young Nour with the Frank"), we read: "O bananas, of soft and smooth skins, which dilate the eyes of young girls ... you, alone among fruits are endowed with a pitying heart, O consolers of widows and divorced women." In France and England they are not uncommonly used for the same purpose.
See, e.g., Winckel, Die Krankheiten der weiblichen Harnrohre und Blase, 1885, p. 211; and "Lehrbuch der Frauenkrankheiten," 1886, p. 210; also, Hyrtl, Handbuch du Topographischen Anatomie, 7th ed., Bd. II, pp. 212-214. Grünfeld (Wiener medizinische Blätter, November 26, 1896), collected 115 cases of foreign body in the bladder—68 in men, 47 in women; but while those found in men were usually the result of a surgical accident, those found in women were mostly introduced by the patients themselves. The patient usually professes profound ignorance as to how the object came there; or she explains that she accidentally sat down upon it, or that she used it to produce freer urination. The earliest surgical case of this kind I happen to have met with, was recorded by Plazzon, in Italy, in 1621 (De Partibus Generationi Inservientibus, lib. ii, Ch. XIII); it was that of a certain honorable maiden with a large clitoris, who, seeking to lull sexual excitement with the aid of a bone needle, inserted it in the bladder, whence it was removed by Aquapendente.
A. Poulet, Traité des Corps étrangers en Chirurgie, 1879. English translation, 1881, vol. ii, pp. 209, 230. Rohleder (Die Masturbation, 1899, pp. 24-31) also gives examples of strange objects found in the sexual organs.