Wouldn't many of our readers have liked the doctor's job?
A SHORT ESSAY
ON SODOMY, Etc.
Sodomy appears to have been one of the most important of the Roman vices and amusements; it was not by any means considered improper. We are speaking of sodomy with males, for we do not find anything much said about sodomy with women in the literature of the Roman day.
We say now a woman is all cunt, and the Marquis de Sade says that he must be a beginner indeed who has not had a boy, or made a boy his mistress. Martial treats sodomy with women good naturedly, and no doubt the Romans practised it. Many moderns are given to having women in the bottom, and most men who have gone in for anything like dissipation have done it now and then, and we sometimes hear of marriages being made unhappy from that unfortunate taste in the husband; but we think that with modern Europeans (except in Turkey, Greece, and part of Italy) it is quite the exception to find a man wedded to that practice; but with the ancient Romans it must have been a vice too common to be even alluded to.
If women are all cunt now what must they have been then?
Sodomy with males, with the above exceptions, is still rarer in the present day, and although we have made the most careful research, we do not know of many professional male sodomites in London; and when we were boys we remember a gentleman who kept a tall young fellow, a Creole, near Leicester Square. Our criminal reports show that such things do take place, and it is not long since that I was in court and heard a gipsy found guilty, first of all of having his own donkey, and afterwards a neighbour's little boy.
The offence is common in France. Ambrose Tardieu speaks of having investigated two hundred and seventeen cases of passive sodomy—not always cases of French subjects—and speaks of the extraordinary enlargement of the sphincter ani arising therefrom. The vice is evidently attractive, from the number of things different admirers of it have inserted in their anus, in default of something better, such as knitting-needles, bottles and glasses; and he especially speaks of bottles of Hungary waters and eau de Cologne being inserted in the bottom-hole, also pieces of wood, and he mentions that in the latter case the whole fist of the surgeon could be introduced into the anus.