Remondino, Chapt. 9, part 1

[JesusA (imported)]

Remondino, Chapter IX

Philosophical Considerations Relating to Eunuchism and Medicine.

[For this chapter, the "philosophical considerations" take precedence over any considerations of "eunuchism." While I may enjoy wallowing in Victorian prose, those readers in search of just the "good parts" will probably do best to read the first two paragraphs below and then to skip ahead to the final paragraph of part 3. --JA]

Eunuchism does not always subdue the animal passions; this is the view that the church took in connection with the emasculation of Origenes and his monks; the church here held that not only was it possible for them to still sin in heart or imagination, but that, even were the complete eradication of the sexual idea possible, they had by their act lost the main glory of a Christian, -that of successfully striving against temptation, and by a force born of triumphant virtue overcome all the wiles of the devil. It is related that among the eunuchs at Rome there were some who, having been made so late in life, still retained the power of copulation, although the final act of the performance was absent. Montfalcon relates that Cabral reported dissecting a soldier who was hanged for committing a rape, but who on dissection showed not the least trace of testicles, either in the scrotum or abdomen, although the seminal vesicles were filled with some fluid. Sprengle, in his "History of Medicine," relates of the complete removal of both testicles from an old man of seventy years of age, on account of inordinate sexual desire, the operation having no perceptible effect in subduing the disease. These cases are analogous to those exceptionable cases in which, after extirpation of the ovaries, both menstruation and fecundation have still taken place.

Modern civilization and its unnatural mode of dressing inflict great harm on men by keeping these parts to warm and constricted. Much of the irritability of these organs, as well as their decadence at an age some generation or two before the time when they should still possess all their virile attributes, can be directly attributed to this cause. A more intelligent way of dressing would result in less moral and physical wreckage, and require less galvanic belts and aphrodisiacs in men under fifty. If those who habitually swath their scrotums in the heavy folds of their flannel shirts, to which are superadded the cotton shirts, drawers, and outer clothes in which civilized man incases himself, would cast a backward eye into the dim and misty past and see the priest of some of the old Pagan gods soaking the scrotum in hot water, and then gradually rubbing the testicles within, by gentle but firm friction, TO MAKE THE TESTICLES DISAPPEAR [italics in the original], a process by which many of the heathen priests prepared themselves for the discharge of their sacerdotal duties and the strict observance of those rules of chastity and celibacy which they were henceforth to live up to, they would find one explanation of why civilized man does not possess that vigor and retain that procreative power into advanced age that was one of the characteristics of our ancient progenitors in the days that breeches were as abbreviated as those now worn by the Sioux Indians. These are really but leggins, which run only to the perineum and are simply tied by outer points to a strap from each hip. Finely and comfortably cushioned chairs may be a luxury to sit on, but they will have, on the man who uses them in youth and in his prime, a wonderful sedative and moral influence later on, about as effectual as the miniature warm baths for the scrotum and gentle pressure to the testicles that were used by the heathen priests of old, who preferred a gradual disappearance of the glands to the too sudden and summary methods of the Cybelian clergy, who used a piece of shell and an elaborately-performed castration. According to Paulus Aegineta, this was a common practice of making eunuchs out of young boys in the Orient, the mortality being hardly any; whereas the 'taille a fleur de ventre,' the favorite method for making eunuchs for harem guards and attendants, and more suited to the jealous dispositions of the Turk, has a mortality of three out of every four, according to Chardin, and of two out of every three according to Clot Bey, the chief physician of the Pasha, and of nine out of ten, according to Bisson. So prone to reach high offices were intelligent eunuchs that it is related that parents were at times induced to treat their boys in the manner above stated, that they might be on the highway to royal favor, honor, and rank; such is the ennobling tendency of Oriental despotism, polygamy, and harem life. On the same principle Europeans subjected their boys to a like operation to fit them for a chorister life or the stage, where fame and honor and wealth were to be found.

Medicine has been the butt of wits and philosophers, as well s of the men who, from the profession, have gone into the ranks of literature. Smollet, himself a physician, give us an insight into our wandering and erratic misapplication of our knowledge on therapeutics in "Peregrine Pickle," where the poor painter, Pallet, is believed to be a victim of hydrophobia. The learned opinion of the doctor, who explains the many and various reasons by which he arrives at his diagnosis, the various physical signs exhibited by the patient as being pathognomonic of the disease, and his final venture with the contents of the 'pot de chambre,' as a diagnosis verifier, which he dashed in the patient's face in preference to ordinary water on account of the medicinal virtues contained in urine, which in the case seemed to him to have a peculiar therapeutic value, is something worth reading, however ludicrous it all sounds. There are few intelligent physicians but who have seen as ridiculous performances, in what might be called medical gymnasts, that equal, if not surpass, those of Smollet's doctor. Rabelais was also a professional brother, who, equally with Smollet, attempted to waken up the profession by his satires. Smollet was not only a physician, but in his early life had seen some very active and practical work, having participated in and been a witness to the ills and misfortunes that follow any attempts to "lock horns" with nature through ignorance of physical laws and preventive medicine, -having been a surgeon's mate in the fleet which assisted the land forces in the murderous and ill-fated Carthagena expedition which cost England so many lives, ignorantly and needlessly sacrificed to ministerial disregard of physical laws and its consequences, -lessons which, unfortunately, seem to have but little effect on cabinets, owning to their shifting personnelle, England following up the disasters of Carthagena with the still greater blunder of the Walcheren expedition, where, out of England's small available physical war material, nearly forty thousand men were either left to fatten the swamps of Walcheren, or to wander through England in after years on the pension-list, physical wrecks and in bodily and financial misery. Again the same disregard, born of ignorance and red tape, crippled the British army in the Crimea, causing in it ranks the greatest mortality. It has seemed as if it would be of advantage if all the blunders, wither philosophical or of statesmanship, committed by a cabinet, should be written in large letters of gold, to be hung in the council-halls of the nations, that similar blunders at least might not occur again.