Clinical gynaecology : medical and surgical, for students and practitioners / by eminent American teachers ; edited by John M. Keating and by Henry C. Coe.

Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical gynaecology : medical and surgical, for students and practitioners / by eminent American teachers ; edited by John M. Keating and by Henry C. Coe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    amorous proclivities of the steer are the scandal of our highways. Alive to these tacts, Oriental as well as Chinese jealousy demands in a eunuch the complete ablation of the genital organs. Not only arc the testes, therefore, removal, but also the scrotum ami the penis Hush with the pubes. Hence, to avoid the soiling of his clothes, every eunuch carries a short silver tube, which he inserts merely in the pubic meatus whenever he passes his water.1 I contended further that, apart from cessation of menstruation and from in- evitable sterility, the woman after castration remains unchanged, having the same natural instincts and affections, that the sexual organs continue ex- citable, and that she is just as womanly and as womanish as ever. I held that the seat of sexuality in woman had long been sought for, but in vain. The clitoris had been amputated, the nymplue had been excised, the tubes and ovaries had been extirpated, yet the sexual desire had survived these mutilations. The seat had not been found, because sexuality is not a mem- ber or an organ, but a sense,—a sense dependent on the sexual apparatus not for its being, but merely for its fruition. My inference was that the physical and psychical influence of the ovaries upon women had been greatly overrated. In the popular mind a woman without ovaries is not a woman. Even Virchow contends that on these two organs [the ovaries] depend all the specific properties of her body and her mind, all her nutrition and her nervous sensibility, the delicacy and roundness of her figure, and, in fact, all other womanly characteristics. This statement I held to be true in so tar as the ovaries arc needful for the primary or rudimcntal de- velopment of woman ; but not true when once she is developed, for then they arc not essential to her perpetuation as woman. In time, however, I slowly found out that the removal of the ovaries does blunt and often does extinguish ultimately the sexual feeling in woman, althongh the removal of the testes after puberty is said not to impair the virile sense of the male. The truth of this random opinion, however, I very much doubt, despite the ribald satires of Juvenal, the gross pleasantries of the Lett res Persanes, and the maudlin sentiment indulged in by De Amiois, and by other travellers, even about the eunuchs of Oriental palaces, who are castrated in infancy. Unquestionably, the secretion and the reten- tion of the seminal fluid are in themselves the great aphrodisiacs. Other- wise we cannot explain the changed behavior of Abelard towards Heloi'se after his forcible castration. Overlooking the effect of such a mutilation, sentimentalists have judged too harshly of' Abelard and have lavished too one-sided a sympathy upon Heloi'se. Giving up, perhaps erroneously, the analogy of a castrated woman to a castrated man, in my more recent teachings I adopted that of the nieno- pause, a- suggested by Koeberlg. I accepted Ids analogy, although I could 1 North American Medico-Chirurgical Review, May. 1861, p. 500; Now York Medi- cal Record, June, 1870, |>. 190; Medical and Surgical Reporter, April 24, 1875, |>. 329; Dictionnaire en Trente, article Eunuque; Universal Medical Journal, November, 1893. p. 329.