History of circumcision from the earliest times to the present

by P. C. Remondino

Religious mania has caused many cases of self-mutilation, either to escape continued promptings and desires, or simply from a resulting species of insanity. Of the first, Sernin[33] reported to the Medical Society of Paris the case of a young priest who had castrated himself with the blade of a pair of scissors, and who nearly lost his life with the subsequent hæmorrhage. The writer saw an analogous case on board an American war-vessel, of which Dr. Lyon was surgeon, in the harbor of Havre, in the spring of 1871, the subject being the ship’s cobbler, a religious fanatic, who was driven insane by self-imposed continence. We are not surprised, from the lack of intelligence of the times, the extreme but undefined views as to religion that then ruled men, that self-imposed castration should have been sanely considered and carried into effect by Origines and his monks. The Cybelian priesthood had formerly set the example in their Pagan worship, and when we are told that the monks of Mount Athos accused the monks of the convent of a neighboring island with falling away from grace, because they allowed hens to be kept within the convent inclosure, we may well believe that Origines and his monks felt that they were gradually ascending in grace when they submitted to this sacrifice. As strange as it may sound, self-castration is still practiced by the Skoptsy, a religious sect in Russia. In justice to the Church, however, it must be said that she neither asked for nor did she sanction these performances, although she was not quick enough in asserting that she recognized the same law in regard to her presbytery that controlled that of the Hebraic priesthood.

Eunuchism presents many contradictory conditions; eunuchs have not always been the fat and sleek attendants on Oriental harems as tradition and custom places them or would have us believe; neither does the loss of virility, in a procreative sense, seem to have always robbed them of their virility in other senses, as we find eunuchs holding the highest offices in the State under the reigns of Alexander, the Ptolemys, Lysimachus, Mithrades, Nero, and Arcadius. The eunuch Aristonikos, under one of the Ptolemys, and another, Narces, under Justinian, led the armies of their sovereigns. These are, however, exceptional cases; as a rule, the result is as we observe in the domestic animals,—loss of spirit, vim, and ambition. The Church recognized this result, and, while the Hebraic law excluded eunuchs from participating in the priesthood as being imperfect and unclean, the Church reproached Origines and his monks and excluded eunuchs from its presbytery on the ground that such beings lack the moral and physical energy requisite in a calling that is supposed to guide or lead men; moreover, there are many reasons for doubting that the ministers of state and the generals of the reigns above mentioned were actually eunuchs in the full acceptance of the word. Among the ancients there were several methods of performing the operations that made the eunuchs; some were more effectual than others. From the removal of all the genitals, or the penis alone, or the scrotum and testicles, or removing only the testicles, down to compression or to distorting the spermatic vessels, or, as in the case of the Scythians, who often became eunuchs from bareback riding, as Hammond describes a eunuchism manufactured by our southwestern Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, are performances that left many degrees of eunuchism; as we find some eunuchs that not only contracted marriage, but engendered children. Voltaire mentions Kislav-aga, of Constantinople, a eunuch à outrance, with neither penis, scrotum, nor anything, who owned a large and select harem. Montesquieu, in his “Persian Letters,” admits this class of marriages as being practiced, but doubts the resulting conjugal felicity, especially on the part of the wife. Potiphar’s wife was one of these unfortunate wives; no wonder that she tore Joseph’s cloak in her desire. Juvenal mentions that some eunuchs were held in high esteem by the Roman matrons; it possibly could have been some of this kind of a eunuch that led armies or ruled in the palaces. Among the sultans and Oriental potentates those who had every exterior evidence of virility removed, so as to be obliged to micturate through the means of a catheter, were considered the safest guards, as well as they were the highest-priced eunuchs, for in their manufacture fully 75 per cent. of those operated upon died as a result. It is related that the Caribs made eunuchs of their prisoners of war on the same principle that caponizing is resorted to for our kitchens,—the prisoners were easier to fatten and were more tender when cooked. The Italians allowed their children to be eunuchized for chorister purposes in church services, their soprano voices after this treatment being simply perfect. It was considered that, in the year prior to the papal ordinance of Pope Clement XVI forbidding the practice or the employment of eunuchs in choirs, four thousand boys, mostly in the neighborhood of Rome, were castrated for chorister purposes.

In China eunuchs were in use during the reign of the Emperor Yen-Wang, in 781 B.C. The Chinese make their eunuchs by a complete ablation of all genitals. In India the followers of Brahma never placed their women in charge of eunuchs. In Italy it was customary to emasculate boys that they might grow up with the faculty of taking the female parts in comedies, their voices thereby assimilating to that of the other sex, this being on the same principle that the basso-profundos were infibulated that they might retain their bass.

Eunuchism resulting from an operation owing to disease has at times given queer and unlooked-for results, as, for instance, in the case of the old man that Sprengle mentions, in whom castration did not remove an inordinate sexual desire. Sir Astley Cooper mentions a case in his “Diseases of the Testes” that is somewhat unique. After castration Sir Astley’s patient showed the following results: “For nearly the first twelve months he stated that he had emissions in coitu, or that he had the sensations of emission; that then he had erections and coitus at distant intervals, but without the sensation of emission. After two years he had excretions very rarely and very imperfectly, and they generally ceased immediately upon the attempt at coitus. Ten years after the operation he said he had during the past year been only once connected. Twenty-eight years after the operation he stated that for years he had seldom any excretion, and then that it was imperfect.” In regard to the mortality from castration done in a professional manner and for disease, Curling, in his work on “Diseases of the Testis,” observes that he saw or performed some thirty operations without a death, and that in a table of like operations performed at the Hôtel Dieu, in Paris, it appeared that the mortality was one in four and a quarter.

J. Royes Bell, in the sixth volume of the “International Encyclopædia of Surgery,” has the following in regard to the practice among the Mohammedans in India: “Young boys are brought from their parents, and the entire genitals are removed with a sharp razor. The bleeding is treated by the application of herbs and hot poultices; hæmorrhage kills half the victims, and at times brings the perpetrators of the vile proceeding within the clutches of the law.

” The taillè à fleur de ventre of the Chinese is a somewhat primitive procedure. According to Dr. Morache, in his account of China in the “Dic. Ency. des Sciences Médicales,” the operation is as follows: “The patient, be he adult or child, is, previous to the operation, well fed for some time. He is then put in a hot water bath. Pressure is exercised on the penis and testes, in order to dull sensibility. The two organs are compressed into one packet, the whole encircled with a silk band, regularly applied from the extremity to the base, until the parts have the appearance of a long sausage. The operator now takes a sharp knife, and with one cut removes the organ from the pubis; an assistant immediately applies to the wound a handful of styptic powder, composed of odoriferous raisins, alum, and dried puffball powder (boletus-powder). The assistant continues the compression till hæmorrhage ceases, adding fresh supplies of the astringent powders; a bandage is added and the patient left to himself. Subsequent hæmorrhage rarely occurs, but obliteration of the canal of the urethra is to be dreaded. If at the end of the third or fourth day the patient does not make water, his life is despaired of. In children the operation succeeds in two out of three cases; in adults, in one-half less. Poverty is the cause which induces adults to allow themselves to be thus mutilated. It is said to be difficult to distinguish these last from ordinary Chinese men. Adult-made eunuchs are much sought after, as they present all the attributes of virility without any of its inconvenience.”

The study of the evolutionary moves or processes passed by eunuchism in its relation to music and the drama tends to rob these otherwise civilizing and enlightened arts of the aureoles of poetry and gentility with which they have been surrounded. From Bergmann we learn that the practice originated in the Orient, where female voices were held in higher esteem in singing, and where the profane songs that accompanied the dance were chanted by women. The Hebraic regulations permitted neither women nor eunuchs to sing in their temples. With the establishment of the early Christian Church in Oriental countries, more or less of the ancient Judaic customs were retained, and in addition a too literal interpretation of the words of St. Paul was adhered to, which said that women should not be heard in the Church. The Oriental Church from these reasons long remained in a quandary; according to the ceremonials, it was deemed requisite to imitate as near as possible the voices of the angelic seraphims, and this could not be done by the rasping bass voices of the well-fed monks; women were out of the question in the then social stage of church evolution; so that at last a compromise was effected by admitting the eunuch, who could chant in a most seraphic soprano, as his prototype, the mendicant priests of Cybele, had done before him.

Constantinople became the centre of learning for Greek music, and the fine soprano solos which now form the attraction of many of our modern churches were sung by the eunuchs. Eunuchs were not only the chief singers, but they cultivated the art into a science, and Constantinople furnished through this class the music-teachers for the world, as we learn that in 1137 the eunuch Manuel and two other singers of his order established a school of music and singing in Smolensk, Russia. There is no doubt but that in a moral sense, considering that women are generally the pupils, this was a most meet and an appropriate arrangement; for, as St. Alphonsus M. Liquori observed, man was a fool to allow his daughters or female wards to be taught letters by a man, even if that man were a saint, and, as real saints were not to be found outside of heaven, it can well be imagined how much more dangerous it might be to have them taught music and singing by a man not a eunuch,—elements which have a recognized special aphrodisiac virtue, as was well known to the ancient Greeks, who only allowed their wives to listen to a certain form of music when they (the husbands) were absent from home.

There is not much room for doubt but that both morality and medicine have too much neglected the study and contemplation of the natural history of man, and relied altogether too much on the efficacy of church regulations and castor-oil and rhubarb. There are other things to be done besides simply framing moral codes and pouring down mandrake into the stomach; the old conjoined service of priest and doctor should never have been discontinued, as, by dividing duties that are inseparable, much harm has resulted. Herein dwelt the great benefit of the early practice of medicine among the Greeks, and to the physical understanding and supervision of human nature by the Hebraic law may be said that the creed owes its greatness and stability, and the Hebrew race its sturdy stamina. The wisdom of the Mosaic laws is something that always challenges admiration, the secret being that it did not separate the moral from the physical nature of man. Bain, Maudsley, Spencer, Haeckle, Buckle, Draper, and all our leading sociologists base all their arguments on the intimate relations that exist between the physical surrounding and the physical condition of man and his morality. Churches foolishly ignore all this.

From Constantinople the fashion or custom gradually invaded Italy; and as Rome was the centre of the new religion, so it also became the centre of music, and Rome and Naples were soon the home of the eunuch devoted or immolated to the science of music. The eunuchs reached the height of their renown in music, as well as what might be termed their golden era, with the establishment of the Italian opera, in the seventeenth century. At this period all the stages of Italy were the scenes of the lyric triumphs of this otherwise unfortunate class, some of whom accumulated vast fortunes. In the following century, as has been seen, Clement XVI abolished the practice as far as the church was concerned, and in the present century the first Napoleon abolished the practice secularly and socially. Mankind cannot sufficiently appreciate the benefits it received from the results of the French Revolution; we are too apt to look at that event simply from the unavoidable means which an uneducated class—rendered desperate by long suffering and brutalization under an organized system of oppressive misrule—had adopted to remedy existing evils. After the dissolution of the Directory France cannot be said to have been in a state of anarchy, and the long and bloody wars with which Napoleon is usually blamed should rather be charged to that government and imbecile ministerial policy that lost to England the American colonies. The series of battles from Marengo to Waterloo are as much the creation of the cabinet of George III as those from Concord to Yorktown. Waterloo involved more than the simple defeat of Napoleon; it meant the defeat of moral and intellectual progress, as well as the suppression of the rights of man. The suppression of the Inquisition in Spain, and of eunuchism in Italy; the Code Napoleon; the Imperial highways of France; the construction of its harbors,—notably that of Havre; and the political and social emancipation of the Jews in France, Italy, and Germany are monuments to this great man that have not their equals to crown the acts of any other French monarch. Like the Phrygian monk who leaped into the arena in Rome to separate the maddened gladiators, and who was stoned to death by the angry and brutal mob of spectators whose amusement he stopped, Napoleon’s work has had its results, in spite of Waterloo and St. Helena. The martyrdom of the poor monk caused an abolishment of the brutal sports of the Colosseum, which henceforth crumbled to pieces. Little did the people look for this result who trampled the monk under foot. Neither did Blucher, debouching on the English left with Bulow’s battalions on the evening of Waterloo, foresee, some fifty years later, Prussia extending its hand to make a united Italy, which with Napoleon—who was by blood, nature, instinct, and education an Italian—had been the dream and ambition of his life.