eunuchs in history

[0.fj.randi (imported)]

Hi all

Since I've been eunuch for over 30 years I've read quite a few articles, etc. about eunuchs in history. My biggest question about this is how did they live so long without hormones? I went 9 years without any hormones, but after having migraines for about a year finally started on T. In the bible Daniel was taken captive into Babylon in his late teens/early 20s and became a eunuch. He lived into his 80s. What did they know back then that has been forgotten?

Here recently I read a few articles saying the eunuchs back then and in China, Japan more recently, etc lived longer than the average person, again what's up with that? Daniel was given a test because he refused to eat the royal, non kosher food and he went on a vegetarian diet. You suppose it is something to do with all the crap we've put in our bodies?

Just food for thought, discussion. Not sure we'll even know.

Randi

[Valery_V (imported)]

Hi all

Since I've been eunuch for over 30 years I've read quite a few articles, etc. about eunuchs in history. My biggest question about this is how did they live so long without hormones? I went 9 years without any hormones, but after having migraines for about a year finally started on T. In the bible Daniel was taken captive into Babylon in his late teens/early 20s and became a eunuch. He lived into his 80s. What did they know back then that has been forgotten?

Here recently I read a few articles saying the eunuchs back then and in China, Japan more recently, etc lived longer than the average person, again what's up with that? Daniel was given a test because he refused to eat the royal, non kosher food and he went on a vegetarian diet. You suppose it is something to do with all the crap we've put in our bodies?

Just food for thought, discussion. Not sure we'll even know.

Randi

Unfortunately did not read the Bible in the original, I know only the separate moments in someone's retelling. I can judge only based on my observations. I never kept to a vegetarian diet. Always believed that meat gives to an organism something similar to testosterone. Constantly played sports for maintenance of health (but not for competitions). Regularly accepted polyvitamins, very seldom testosterone.

[erikboy (imported)]

I have an impression that our body becomes dependant on testosterone over time. Although it is almost missing from prepubertal boy bloodstream, it later takes up some important port in regulating secondary processes in our body and the whole endocrine system changes a bit. For example dopamine depletion occurs only after castration after puberty. It seems like older men suffer from it more than younger. Also younger person seem to be more sensitive to testosterone, while older needs more to achieve these same effects he experienced in youth. But it is just my speculation, I haven't seen any scientific data that would prove my hypothesis or destroy it.

[JesusA (imported)]

Hi all

Since I've been eunuch for over 30 years I've read quite a few articles, etc. about eunuchs in history. My biggest question about this is how did they live so long without hormones?

<<SNIP>>

Randi

For information about eunuch longevity, take a stroll through the Non-Fiction Articles board on the Archive. There are threads about longevity of Korean eunuchs and about boys castrated for eugenics reasons in the state of Kansas. There is brief mention on the longevity of Italian castrati. In all three cases, prepubertal eunuchs lived an average of about 15 years longer than intact men of similar social status in the same time and place.

[billblack (imported)]

How & why did you become an eunuch.

[racerboy (imported)]

If you were reading the King James version of the Bible, be aware that "meat" as used there has the archaic meaning of "food." So it was the rich foods of the king that Daniel refused to eat. However from the context, even if his diet included what we today call "meat" there was almost certainly a lot less than in the royal diet.

[jman0001 (imported)]

It's also important to consider that general statistics, especially ones that cover huge swaths of history (for which we have sparse records as it is) can be misleading. For example, it's a common belief that historically people died early, in their 20s and 30s, with 26 and 28 being commonly said as "the average age of death." But averages are just that, and in many cases (and again, this depends on area of the world and culture and society and time period) living into your 50s and 60s was pretty common but a high infant mortality lowered the age expectancy considerably. Whereas it was often the case that if you survived your childhood you had a reasonable chance of living to be middle aged.

And it's the same thing with eunuchs. Eunuchs often did live longer on average than non castrated males, but there's a lot of factors there to consider. Men who were not castrated historically had jobs that involved a lot of physical labor and endurance whereas eunuchs typically didn't. Eunuchs often had higher class positions in society--so access to better diet, better health care, better shelter, all of these sorts of things--whereas a non castrated male would be less likely to. Eunuchs are a very unstudied subject, historically and in modern times, so any information we do have is likely to not be extensively researched or peer reviewed. Not that we should discount the information we do have, but the less information available means the less reliable we can consider it. Finally, eunuchs are a very small segment of the population (even in periods of history and cultures where it was somewhat commonly performed) and any time you have a small sample size it can skew the data. Especially in this case, since the operation was likely to kill anyone who couldn't survive it for a variety of reasons, yet these didn't survive long enough to really be considered eunuch males wouldn't be included in these samples that we do have.

And there's other factors, men who were castrated but weren't able to get those high society jobs would be more likely to hide their status in order to do more physical labor type work--something likely to kill them much earlier. Men who were castrated and didn't have a reason to disclose this information probably wouldn't, so any record of their deaths (and the age it occurred at) would likely not include that they were castrated at some point.

Testosterone certainly plays a factor in a man living longer if his testicles are removed, but this alone is not likely to account for how much longer castrated males tended to live. Compare our modern day statistics of mens' vs womens' life expectancies, while women do live longer than men on average, it's usually not more than a few years. If it was solely testosterone responsible for a eunuch's longevity we would expect the difference to be similar.

[TopManFL (imported)]

Anne Rice's novel, "Cry to Heaven" came to mind.

The first line is, "Guido Maffeo was castrated when he was six years old..."

With that being the first line, you can imagine how much castration plays into the rest of the book. She describes in detail how being castrated affects the body. She also gets into some very graphic descriptions of how senior church officials used eunuchs in bed. After all, being eunuchs, they couldn't get pregnant.

TMFL

[JesusA (imported)]

In response to jman0001 (post #7):

An article on the lifespan of Korean eunuchs by Min, Lee, and Park (two biologists and a historian) has been cited many times. It is based on two factors that came together in traditional Korea. In a number of times and places where eunuchs were common, they were allowed to marry and to adopt. Usually they could only adopt young eunuchs, though there were some exceptions. Until the fall of the Korean Joseon Dynasty in 1910, Korean eunuchs were allowed to marry and to adopt young eunuchs. Korea also has a long tradition of compiling detailed family histories that may be kept up for many generations. One farm family in a small village showed me their family history that had been kept for 14 generations. The current head of the family also took me to see the tombs of his 13 generations of known ancestors.

Min, Lee, and Park calculated the life span of eunuchs derived from such family histories and compared them to the life span of contemporary intact males from upper-class families. In terms of socio-economic standing, the two groups were probably comparable. They found that the average lifespan of a Korean eunuch was about 70 years, 14 to 19 years higher than non-castrated men of similar social standing. Three of 81 eunuchs whose exact birth and date dates were given lived to be over 100 years old. The researchers calculated that the rate of centenarians among this group of eunuchs was at least 130 times higher than the current rate in developed countries. (Min, Lee, & Park 2012)

Hans Fritz (1994) did a bit of legwork on the life span of Italian castrati. Records are not nearly so good, and he could only find 47 examples where there were both birth and death years. For the 47 (with birth dates between 1588 and 1781 and a death date as late as 1861) he calculated an average life span of 70 years. With no footnotes, he estimated an average life expectancy of an upper class Italian male who had survived to adulthood as about 62.

The best study on the life expectancy of castrated males is that by Hamilton & Mestler (1969). Theirs was a study of the hundreds of males who had been castrated at the Topeka State Hospital in Kansas between 1895 and 1950. For their study they selected 322 castrated White (eliminating all Black and other race) males who had no diagnosis for anything known to restrict life expectancy. These were compared with a matched set of 735 intact White males who had been institutionalized at about the same date and age and with similar mental and health conditions. The age of castration ranged from 8 to 59. They also calculated the life span of 883 intact White females and 23 White females who had been oophorectomized in the institution and who had similar diagnoses.

The median life span for uncastrated male inmates of the institution was 64.7 years. Both the intact and oophorectomized females had an average life span of 65.2 years.

Median life span for those males who had been castrated was

76.3 (castrated at ages 8 through 14) – 27 boys

72.9 (castrated at ages 15 through 19) – 124 boys

69.6 (castrated at ages 20 through 29) – 80 men

68.9 (castrated at ages 30 through 39) – 53 men

Nico Nagelkerke (2012) re-analyzed Hamilton & Mestler's data and concluded that "there was a loss of 0.28 years of potential life for each year of delay in orchiectomy from 8 to 39 years of age."

_______

Fritz, Hans. (1994). Kastratengesang: hormonelle, konstitutionelle und pädagogische Aspecte. Tutzing: Verlegt bei Hans Schneider.

Hamilton, James B. & Mestler, Gordon E. (1969). Mortality and Survival: Comparison of Eunuchs with Intact Men and Women in a Mentally Retarded Population. Journal of Gerontology, vol. 24, pp. 395–411.

Min Kyung-Jin, Lee Cheol-Koo, & Park Han-Nam. (2012). The lifespan of Korean eunuchs. Current Biology, vol. 22, no. 18, R792.

Nagelkerke, Nico J.D. (2012). Courtesans and Consumption: How Sexually Transmitted Infections Drive Tuberculosis Epidemics. Delft, Netherlands: Uitgeverij Eburon, pp. 99-101.

[0.fj.randi (imported)]

Thank you, your explanation fits my experience exactly.