Dr. Gideon Lincecum, a self-taught Texas physician, was the first on record to state that castration was the surest and safest cure for criminal behavior. A colleague, Dr. Harry C. Sharp of Indiana, commented that, following the procedure, his patients felt "that they were stronger, slept better, their memory improved, the will became stronger, and they did better in school." Dr. Sharp also expressed the belief that a state institution ought to "render every male sterile who passes through its portals, whether it be almshouse, insane asylum, institute for the feeble-minded, reformatory or prison," and he helped push the first mandatory sterilization bill through a state legislature in 1907. The Indiana law authorized, as Philip J. Reilly discloses in The Surgical Solution:

The compulsory sterilization of any confirmed criminal, idiot, rapist, or imbecile in a state institution whose condition had been determined to be "unimprovable" by an appointed panel of physicians.

stevesd (imported) wrote: Fri Apr 15, 2005 2:55 pm Dr. Gideon Lincecum, a self-taught Texas physician, was the first on record to state that castration was the surest and safest cure for criminal behavior. A colleague, Dr. Harry C. Sharp of Indiana, commented that, following the procedure, his patients felt "that they were stronger, slept better, their memory improved, the will became stronger, and they did better in school." Dr. Sharp also expressed the belief that a state institution ought to "render every male sterile who passes through its portals, whether it be almshouse, insane asylum, institute for the feeble-minded, reformatory or prison," and he helped push the first mandatory sterilization bill through a state legislature in 1907. The Indiana law authorized, as Philip J. Reilly discloses in The Surgical Solution:

The compulsory sterilization of any confirmed criminal, idiot, rapist, or imbecile in a state institution whose condition had been determined to be "unimprovable" by an appointed panel of physicians.

Interesting bit of history! Some of the reluctance of physicians to perform voluntary castrations today and the extreme sensitivity of the entirety of the medical profession to removing a guy's testicles likely stems from the abuse of asylum patients during much of the 20th century. Of course, that a guy is a bit less than whole following partial emasculation of his genitals is also a large factor, and that'd be the case without the history of patient abuse.