On the fifth day after birth it is the custom among the Omaha Indians of North America to christen the infant, the child being stripped and spotted with a red pigment; considerable ceremony accompanies the act.[23]
Among the cannibals of Australia, Lumholtz[24] observed a practice that seems to have no analogue in the wide world, either as an operation or in regard to its purposes. About ninety-five per cent. of the children are subjected to the ordeal. This is no less than the formation of an artificial hypospadias; this abnormality is formed through the penis into the urethra, near its junction with the scrotum; the wound is about an inch in length and is made with a flint knife which serves for no other purpose; the edges of the wound are burned with a hot stone, and the wound is subsequently kept open by the introduction of a small piece of wood, which, on healing, leaves a permanent opening. These cannibals undoubtedly are inspired by some Malthusian spirit which impels them thus to functionally eunuchize themselves in one sense, as during copulation the seminal discharge flies out backward through this opening, being thereby a most effectual check on further procreation. By some, this practice has been attributed to the unreliability of the seasons in regard to food-production; but Lumholtz observes that where the practice is most in vogue—among the tribes to the west of the Diamantina River and west and north of the Gulf of Carpentaria—the food-supply is not deficient, the region being full of rats, fish, and vegetables. All the tribes are not subject to the practice of the operation at the same time of life; in some, the hypospadias is not produced until in adult life and after the person has married and has become the father of one or two children, when he must submit to the requirements of the law; the operation seems to be invested with some civil or religious significance, as a palisade or stockade of trees is placed around the place where it is performed. A native, aged about twenty years, informed Lumholtz that the operation was performed because the blacks did not like to hear the children cry about the camp, and, further, that they were not desirous of having many children; this native had not yet become a father and had not yet been subjected to the operation. The natives were observed to be fat and in good physical condition.
There is something mysterious in this operation. It can easily be conceived how circumcision might at times have been suggested by its spontaneous and natural performance without any assistance from man. Cullerier reports one case of partial circumcision through the means of an accident happening to a painter. The man was at work on a ladder, with a small bucket of paint hooked into one of the rounds above him; through some means the bucket lost its hold and in falling struck the penis on its dorsum with such force that the prepuce was cut through on a parallel with the corona of the glans for fully two-thirds of its circumference, the glans slipping through the opening and gathering in a fleshy bunch underneath the frenum. This man carried this abnormality for some years, when, desiring to marry and seeing that this appendage would be as much of an impediment as one of the huge rings worn by the Hindoo devotee, he applied to Cullevier for advice, who promptly removed it with the knife.[25] The writer has seen three cases, during his practice, of spontaneous circumcision, all resulting from phymosis as a secondary affection to venereal disease. The first case occurred when he first entered into practice; it was in a young, stout, and full-blooded man with a violent gonorrhœa. There was much swelling and tumefaction of the whole organ, which seemed to be very rebellious to all treatment. At one of his morning visits he was horrified to observe a transverse, livid mark at what seemed to be the middle of the organ; by noon this had gained ground to the right and left and there was no mistaking that it meant nothing less than mortification. Never having seen a case, the natural uncomfortable conclusion was that, through some cause or other or the natural result of excessive congestion, the man was about to lose one-half of his organ; and Burnside at Fredericksburg was in no greater state of suspense and uncertainty with the fate of the Army of the Potomac on his hands than the writer must acknowledge he was with this man and his organ apparently liquefying under his treatment. The surprise can be better imagined than described when, on the following morning, the glans made its appearance safe and sound out of its imprisonment, and at right angles with the organ there hung the prepuce, thick and as large and as long as the penis itself, inflammatory deposit and infiltration having brought it to that shape and consistence; the glans became completely uncovered; the parts gathered underneath, where, in the course of some weeks, they had shrunk to the size of a walnut, which was afterward removed by the knife. In this case, as in the other two cases observed, the corona was very prominent and acted as an internal tourniquet by its upward pressure, the line of demarkation being on the dorsum in the three cases noted.
That such cases would suggest circumcision is not only probable but possible, as it would point out the manner of performing the operation; but, in the cases of the Australian savages, who performed an artificial hypospadias on themselves for a specific purpose, requiring a knowledge of the anatomical relation of the parts as well as of their physiological functions, it is hard to speculate how the operation was first suggested or how it came at first to be performed. As a Malthusian agent it is certainly an operation of the highest merit, and it should be introduced, by all means, in the United States, where the wealth and luxury in which the people dwell is fast drifting them toward the same whirlpool that engulfed Rome, which was preceded by a dislike to have children. Whenever the writer sees the poor anæmic, broken-down victim of many miscarriages, he cannot help but feel that, if the laws of the Damiantina River savages were enforced on their husbands, it would be a blessing to the poor women without materially injuring the husbands, who, in case of need of a re-establishment of the functions of procreation, might be fitted with a vulcanite plate for the occasion,—something like our cleft-palate patients are supplied with a plate that enables them to articulate.
It was the custom among the Hottentots, when first discovered or known to the whites, to remove one of their testicles. This was supposed to enable them to run more swiftly and to be lighter-footed in the race. The real reason, afterward found, was a mixture of pure humanitarianism and Malthusianism boiled down to Hottentot ethics. With them a monorchid was not supposed to beget twins; when twins are born in the family, the mother generally smothers the female, if one happens to be such; if not, then the feeblest of the two is sacrificed. In their migratory and nomadic life the mother finds it impossible to either carry or care for the two children. The male Hottentot, rather than have any avoidable infanticide in his family, or that his wife should go through and suffer the annoyance and pangs of an unnecessary and unprofitable pregnancy, generously has one testicle removed; this is something that the ordinary civilized white man would not do, even if his legitimate wife and all his outside concubines were to have twins or triplets every nine months; so that, even as strange as it may appear, civilization must need go to the wild Bushmen in search of that grand old Quixotic chivalry that was in ancient times always ready to sacrifice itself for the welfare of woman.
The old Greek and Roman statues, representing the gods and athletes of ancient Greece and Rome, are a puzzle to many, owing to the diminutive and phimosed virile organ that the artists have attached to them. Galen represents that the disuse of the organ by the athletes was the cause of its undeveloped form, and that as the organ of these did not figure in the worship of Venus, or participate in the festivals of Bacchus, but was used solely and simply for micturating purposes, impotence was often the result, citing the case of a patient who came to consult him for an obstinate priapism resulting from venereal excess, who met, in his anteroom, an athlete who was being treated for the opposite condition, due to the too rigid continence to which he had been for years subjected. Acton does not believe that continued continence has that effect, quoting Dr. Bergeret, who had long been physician to a number of religious societies, as saying that he had never seen serious troubles of the organs of generation in these communities, which denotes that if they indulged in proper fasting and prayer they were in the same condition of flaccid impotence as the athlete in Galen’s anteroom. Louis VII, of France, tried fasting and prayer in connection with rigid continence, and, as a result, his wife, Queen Eleonore, was divorced from him and married Henry II, of England, who had not been continent. Hence, we see that the old sculptors, whether wishing to represent Jupiter or Plato, Æsculapius or Mars, a strongly knit and muscular frame was desired, an athlete, gladiator, or soldier being used as a model; the small, puerile, funnel-prepuced organ belonged to all these muscular or well-trained classes, was a natural appendage, as enforced continence and the most absolute chastity was the rule, to enforce which they even resorted to infibulation. This enforced continence often resulted in impotence, even before the prime of life was passed, accompanied by an inevitable atrophy of the male organ, with the resulting prepuce in the shape in which it is found in a boy of from eight to twelve years, precisely as they are found on the statues. How faithful the sculptors and artists were to nature and life in their representations can well be imagined by a critical examination of the Apollo Belvidere, where the difference of the scrotal position that exists between the right and left testicles is carried out to the minutest anatomical detail. In our age it is hard to conceive why their most masculine men should be deified, and all their gods represented as the most perfect of bodily development, while at the same time the finest physical specimens of manhood were doomed to a life of the most rigorous continence. It is also astonishing that all this should be done not from any principle or consideration of morality or virtue, but simply as a means subservient in producing at its maximum the highest degree of physical development and endurance.
CHAPTER VI.
Attempts to Abolish Circumcision.
Probably no rite or practice of a custom has been such a long-standing bone of contention as circumcision; nor does the Sphynx surpass this relic of bygone ages in mystery. From time immemorial its practice has been the subject of disputes, and its literature finds oftentimes its friends and foes ranged side by side. At one time a noted Israelite and Voltaire, the scoffer of Judaism, may be consulted on the question as to whether Israelite or Egyptian is entitled to priority as to its original practice with a like answer; and, again, Christians are found who, after a careful investigation, will accord this to the Israelites. In Rome, the persecuted Hebrew was stopped on the street and compelled to show the mark of circumcision, that he might be taxed, and in Turkish parts the Christian was subjected to the same indignity to enable the tax-gatherer to harvest the impost which he paid for his liberty of conscience and not being circumcised. When the monkish missionaries of the Catholic faith first entered Abyssinia, they were shocked to find their converts insisting on their time-honored practice of circumcision; and later, when the Propaganda sent its own missionaries, they were scandalized to see Christians practicing what they looked upon as an infidel rite; and nothing but the most earnest confession of faith, with the assurance that the rite of circumcision was only a physical remedy, and that in their conscience it in no wise possessed any religious significance, and that neither did they, in any sense, hold it in any connection with the sacrament of baptism, permitted these Abyssinians to save themselves from excommunication. Later still, when an Abyssinian bishop was present in Lisbon, the clergy of the city refused him the right of celebrating the sacrifice of the holy mass in the Cathedral of Lisbon, on the ground that he, having been circumcised, was no better than a heretic. The Abyssinian Christians still practice the rite at the present day.