Curiositates Eroticae Physiologiae

[JesusA (imported)]

My recent journey to the Kinsey Institute library in Indiana turned up very few sources on eunuchs that I had not already read. The two most interesting of these were a comic book series delineating the history of Chinese eunuchs that was written at about the junior high reading level and an 1875 book by John Davenport titled Curiositates Eroticae Physiologiae; or , Tabooed Subjects Freely Treated. in Six Essays (London: Privately Printed). Essay number 5, Eunuchism, covered pages 104 to 153. Below are a few excerpts from the volume. They are NOT to be treated as true, but merely as that particular author’s take on reality and as indicative of thoughts about castration and eunuchs in the mid 19th century.

it is certain that leprosy never attacks eunuchs. (p. 112)

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That eunuchs never become bald, and that they are exempt from the gout is affirmed by both Hippocrates and Pliny. (p. 113)

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A depraved and unnatural taste was another rife cause of castration, for, in order to gratify the vilest and most detestable propensitites, the most beautiful boys that could be found, from the age of fourteen to that of seventeen, were chosen for emasculation, a practice which St. Gregory bitterly complains of in his 31st discourse. (p. 120)

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Geoffry, the father of our Henry II, being master of Normandy, the Chapter of Seez presumed, without his authority, to proceed to the election of a bishop; upon which he ordered the whole of them to be castrated, and caused all their testicles to be brought to him on a platter. (p. 121)

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Complete eunuchs were extremely dear, on account of the great danger attending the operation, and the numbers who died in consequence of it.

Tavernire and Thevenot, travellers worthy of credit, affirm that scarcely one-fourth of those subjected to this kind of mutilation survive, the operation being performed upon negroes of from eight to ten years of age. [Other observers give death rates from the very brutal total emasculations performed in East Africa in a range from 10% to 90%. The contemporary Chinese emasculations – with more care and better medicine – had a documented death rate of about 3%. ––JA]

Besides those black eunuchs, there are others at Constantinople and Persia, who, for the most part, come from Golconda, Transgangetic India, Assam, Pegu, and Malabar, where the complexion is grey, and from the gulf of Bengal, where it is coloured.

There are also white eunuchs from Georgia and Circassia, these latter, however, are but few in number.

Tavernire says that when he was in the kingdom of Golconda, in the year 1675, not less than twenty-two thousand individuals were castrated. (pp. 135–36) 60[/b] castrations per day, 365 days per year. ––JA]

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Aristotle himself must have had a favourable opinion of the emasculated since he says, in his 9th book upon natural history – “But all animals if castrated when young become larger and more elegant than those who are not so mutilated;” and Quintillian himself admits that castration improves the beauty of boys. (p. 144)

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Ecclesiastical writers declare that such (a eunuch) was the Holy Evangelist St. John, whom Jesus loved beyond all his other disciples, who lay upon Jesus’ bosom, who, while Peter tardily advanced, flew, borne on the wings of virginity, to the Lord, and who, penetrating into the secrets of the Divine Nativity, was emboldened to declare what preceeding ages had been ignorant of. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (pp. 144–45)