Intermarriage, or, The mode in which, and the causes why, beauty, health and intellect, result from certain unions, amd deformity, disease and insanity, from others ... / by Alexander Walker.

  • Walker, Alexander, 1779-1852.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Intermarriage, or, The mode in which, and the causes why, beauty, health and intellect, result from certain unions, amd deformity, disease and insanity, from others ... / by Alexander Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by University of Bristol Library. The original may be consulted at University of Bristol Library.

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    Lord Bacon, in his New Atlantis, notices the custom here mentioned, and objects to it as imply- ing «a scorn to give refusal after so familiar a knowledge.' But because of many hidden defects in men and women's bodies, he establishes, in his commonwealth, another which he calls « a more civil way.'— Near every town are a couple of pools, which they call Adam and Eve's pools, where it is permitted to one of the friends of the man, and another of the friends of the woman, to see them severally bathe naked. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, says Lycurgus appointed [the above custom] in his laws; and More in his Utopian commonwealth approves of it.— Francis Sforza, continues he, Duke of Milan, was so curious in this behalf, that he would not marry the Duke of Mantua's daugh- ter, except he might see her naked first. All this may be thought a little too particular; but it is not quite so much so as the discipline at one time actually practised in the northern portion of our own country. If any one, says Boethius, were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease, which was likely to be propagated from father to son, he was instantly castrated : if it were a woman, she was debarred all intercourse with men; and if she were found pregnant with such complaint upon c