In our own day the most accomplished voluptuaries are in no wise shocked at undertaking in secret the most shameful doings, but yet when it comes to showing the Physician the diseased instruments of their bestial lusts, often put this off so long as to run great risks of entirely losing the signs of their manhood; and without a doubt it was the same at the period when habitual depravity had reached its culminating point of enormity. Even Priapus himself asks (Carm. 3):
Nec mihi sit crimen, quod mentula semper operta est.
(Nor let it be laid as a crime against me, that my member is ever covered up.) If with this is compared the poem from the Priapeia quoted on p. 74 of Vol. I., no one can fail to agree with us when we say that the field of observation open to Physicians in Antiquity with regard to diseases of the genitals can never have been at all extended. Even the Priests, at any rate in later times, were only resorted to in the more serious instances; but even so their journals of cases, supposing them ever to have kept such, would have been a far better source of information than those of the Physicians. We find a confirmation of this in the Mosaic Books of the Law, which contain the earliest and clearest delineations we possess of affections of the genital organs both in men and women.
But if men were so reluctant, how much more so must women have been, who were universally held to have committed a crime if they had given any part of their body to the eyes of a stranger. Just as the assistance of the Physician was disdained in childbirth, and to account for the fact the fable of Agnodicé invented, in the same way in complaints of the genitals women hesitated to submit themselves to the inquisition of the Physician. But seeing the female sexual organs are pre-eminently the home and breeding place of Venereal disease, this closed what was precisely the most direct way to a correct understanding of maladies of the genitals. The ancient Physicians, like our own forefathers, could at best make leucorrhœa the universal scape-goat; and accordingly even Galen, as we shall find presently, laid no stress on the circumstance, and drew no inference from it, that wherever men were attacked by gonorrhœa, the women with whom they had had coition likewise suffered from the complaint.
Further, to this general sense of shame was added a certain timidity before the professional status of real Physicians as a class, as well as the pretty universally prevalent idea of the ignominiousness of a sickness brought on by a person’s own fault, at any rate among the educated part of the population. This comes out in the following passage of Plato,[275] where he says: “Does it appear to you disgraceful to stand in need of medical help, when it is not wounds at all or such sicknesses as depend on the seasons that have befallen, but when a man through indolence and a way of life such as we have noted (i.e. a very luxurious one), is filled full of fluxes and accumulations of wind like a sea, giving occasion to the noble sons of Asclepius to designate these complaints by the names of superfetations and catarrhs?” This was more than a mere expression of individual opinion; there is no doubt affections of the genital organs, more especially if their relation to sexual intercourse was known, belonged to the class of diseases held to be most disgraceful,[276] and the Poet is justified in saying:
Diis me legitimis nimisque magnis
Ut Phoebo puta, filioque Phoebi
Curatum dare mentulam verebar.
(To the lawful gods, deities too exalted for me, such for instance as Phoebus, and Phoebus’son, I feared to entrust my member for cure.) Thus it was not to the “noble sons of Asclepius”, in other words the Physicians, who treated freemen only, that patients resorted for help, but to the gods, or else to the medical underlings (ὑπηρέται τῶν ἰατρῶν,—subordinate assistants of the physicians), to the slave-doctors and quacks, who plied their trade in the doctor’s shops,—establishments where, as we have seen above, paederasts and pathics foregathered. Exactly the same state of things prevailed down to the middle of the last Century; and to this day a majority of such sufferers rarely as a matter of fact come under any other hands.
The knowledge and observations of these Cullers of simples and Compounders of balsams, if indeed as a rule they really possessed the former, or knew how to make the latter, necessarily perished on their decease, or at best were passed on by tradition to their successors in the doctor’s shops, without professional Physicians or medical Science being one whit advantaged. To such men it was a matter of perfect indifference what was the origin of the disease for which they sold their powders and decoctions, for as Plato (De legg. IV. 720) says, they paid no attention to the existing conditions of disease, and did not care to give a thought to any such thing. But at any rate,—and this was the chief point,—the patient was spared a humiliating confession, and was glad enough to buy the privilege even at the cost of possible ruin to his health. We must further remember that the “filles de joie” in Greece and at Rome were mostly slave-women, who from the very fact of their status could make no claim to treatment by free-born physicians, and that during the flourishing period of Greek medicine under the Hippocratic school it was chiefly persons of the lowest station or else sailors and foreign traders and the like who sought enjoyment in the arms of prostitutes. Such men by their constant change of abode made all continued observation a simple impossibility, so that the very imperfect knowledge possessed by the scientifically trained Physicians with regard to diseases of the genitals and their consequences need occasion little surprise.