PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS RELATING TO EUNUCHISM AND MEDICINE.
Eunuchism does not always subdue the animal passions; this is the view
that the church took in connection with the emasculation of Origenes and
his monks; the church here held that not only was it possible for them
to still sin in heart or imagination, but that, even were the complete
eradication of the sexual idea possible, they had by their act lost the
main glory of a Christian,--that of successfully striving against
temptation, and by a force born of triumphant virtue overcome all the
wiles of the devil. It is related that among the eunuchs at Rome there
were some who, having been made so late in life, still retained the
power of copulation, although the final act of the performance was
absent. Montfalcon relates that Cabral reported dissecting a soldier who
was hanged for committing a rape, but who on dissection showed not the
least trace of testicles, either in the scrotum or abdomen, although the
seminal vesicles were filled with some fluid.[34] Sprengle, in his
"History of Medicine," relates of the complete removal of both testicles
from an old man of seventy years of age, on account of inordinate sexual
desire, the operation having no perceptible effect in subduing the
disease.[35] These cases are analogous to those exceptionable cases in
which, after extirpation of the ovaries, both menstruation and
fecundation have still taken place.
Modern civilization and its unnatural mode of dressing inflict great
harm on men by keeping these parts too warm and constricted. Much of
the irritability of these organs, as well as their _decadence_ at an age
some generation or two before the time when they should still possess
all their virile attributes, can be directly attributed to this cause. A
more intelligent way of dressing would result in less moral and physical
wreckage, and require less galvanic belts and aphrodisiacs in men under
fifty. If those who habitually swath their scrotums in the heavy folds
of their flannel shirts, to which are superadded the cotton shirts,
drawers, and outer clothes in which civilized man incases himself, would
cast a backward eye into the dim and misty past, and see the priest of
some of the old Pagan gods soaking the scrotum in hot water, and then
gradually rubbing the testicles within, by gentle but firm friction, _to
make the testicles disappear_, a process by which many of the heathen
priests prepared themselves for the discharge of their sacerdotal duties
and the strict observance of those rules of chastity and celibacy which
they were henceforth to live up to, they would find _one_ explanation of
why civilized man does not possess that vigor and retain that
procreative power into advanced age that was one of the characteristics
of our ancient progenitors in the days that breeches were as abbreviated
as those now worn by the Sioux Indians. These are really but leggins,
which run only to the perineum and are simply tied by outer points to a
strap from each hip. Finely and comfortably cushioned chairs may be a
luxury to sit on, but they will have, on the man who uses them in youth
and in his prime, a wonderful sedative and moral influence later on,
about as effectual as the miniature warm baths for the scrotum and
gentle pressure to the testicles that were used by the heathen priests
of old, who preferred a gradual disappearance of the glands to the too
sudden and summary methods of the Cybelian clergy, who used a piece of
shell and an elaborately-performed castration. According to Paulus
AEgineta, this was a common practice of making eunuchs out of young boys
in the Orient, the mortality being hardly any; whereas the _taille a
fleur de ventre_, the favorite method for making eunuchs for harem
guards and attendants, and more suited to the jealous disposition of the
Turk, has a mortality of three out of every four, according to Chardin,
and of two out of every three, according to Clot Bey, the chief
physician of the Pasha,[36] and of nine out of ten, according to Bisson.
So prone to reach high offices were intelligent eunuchs that it is
related that parents were at times induced to treat their boys in the
manner above stated, that they might be on the highway to royal favor,
honor, and rank; such is the ennobling tendency of Oriental despotism,
polygamy, and harem life. On the same principle Europeans subjected
their boys to a like operation to fit them for a chorister life or the
stage, where fame and honor and wealth were to be found.
Medicine has been the butt of wits and philosophers, as well as of the
men who, from the profession, have gone into the ranks of literature.
Smollet, himself a physician, gives us an insight into our wandering and
erratic misapplication of our knowledge on therapeutics in "Peregrine
Pickle," where the poor painter, Pallet, is believed to be a victim of
hydrophobia. The learned opinion of the doctor, who explains the many
and various reasons by which he arrives at his diagnosis, the various
physical signs exhibited by the patient as being pathognomonic of the
disease, and his final venture with the contents of the _pot de
chambre_, as a diagnosis verifier, which he dashes in the patient's face
in preference to ordinary water on account of the medicinal virtues
contained in urine, which in the case seemed to him to have a peculiar
therapeutic value, is something worth reading, however ludicrous it all
sounds. There are few intelligent physicians but who have seen as
ridiculous performances, in what might be called medical gymnasts, that
equal, if not surpass, those of Smollet's doctor. Rabelais was also a
professional brother, who, equally with Smollet, attempted to waken up
the profession by his satires. Smollet was not only a physician, but in
his early life had seen some very active and practical work, having
participated in and been a witness to the ills and misfortunes that
follow any attempts to "lock horns" with nature through ignorance of
physical laws and preventive medicine,--having been a surgeon's mate in
the fleet which assisted the land forces in the murderous and ill-fated
Carthagena expedition which cost England so many lives, ignorantly and
needlessly sacrificed to ministerial disregard of physical laws and its
consequences,--lessons which, unfortunately, seem to have but little
effect on cabinets, owing to their shifting _personelle_, England
following up the disasters of Carthagena with the still greater blunder
of the Walcheren expedition, where, out of England's small available
physical war material, nearly forty thousand men were either left to
fatten the swamps of Walcheren, or to wander through England in after
years on the pension-list, physical wrecks and in bodily and financial
misery.[37] Again, the same disregard, born of ignorance and red tape,
crippled the British army in the Crimea, causing in its ranks the
greatest mortality. It has seemed as if it would be of advantage if all
the blunders, either philosophical or of statesmanship, committed by a
cabinet, should be written in large letters of gold, to be hung in the
council-halls of the nations, that similar blunders at least might not
occur again.
Dumas, in his "History of the Two Centuries" and his "History of the
Century of Louis the XIV," gives some very interesting medical touches.
Le Sage, in his "Adventures of Gil Blas," gives us food for speculating
on medical philosophy in connection with the interesting subject of how
to make the profession remunerative. Dickens's ideas of the doctor, as
given in his works, are life touches. Witness his description of the
little doctor who superintended little David Copperfield's advent into
the world, or of Dr. Slammer of the army; they represent his view of the
professional character. Fontenelle, probably, was right in ascribing the
fact of his becoming a centenarian, and maintaining a stomach with the
force and resistance that are the peculiar characteristics and
attributes of a chemical retort, to the fact that when sick it was his
practice to throw the doctor's physic out of the window as the doctor
went out of the door, as in his day a man required the constitution of a
rhinoceros and the stomach of an ostrich, with the external
insensibility of a crocodile, to withstand the ordinary doctor of the
period and his medications. Napoleon believed that Baron Larrey was the
most virtuous, intelligent, useful, and unselfish man in existence; in
fact, it is doubtful if any man of his time commanded from this truly
great man so much admiration or respect, either for bravery, courage,
intelligence, or activity, as the great and simple-minded Larrey. As
observed by Napoleon of his bravest general,--poor Marshal Ney, the
bravest of the brave, the rear guard of the grand army, the last man to
leave Russian soil,--Ney was a lion in action, but a fool in the closet.
All his generals had some great distinguishing characteristic, beyond
which was a barren waste, a vacuity, but too apparent to a man of
Napoleon's discernment. But the cool, unflinching bravery of Larrey,
that did not require the stimulus of the fight or the phrenzy of strife
to bring it to the surface and keep it alive; bravery and intelligence
alike active under showers of shot and shell or in the thunders of
charging squadrons; in the face of infective epidemics or
contagiousness, walking about in these scenes in which his own life was
as much at stake as that of the meanest soldier, with the same cool
exercise of his intelligence that he exhibited in the organization and
superintendence of his hospitals in the time of peace; always the same,
untiring, unmurmuring, brave, studious, observing, unflinching in his
duties, unselfish; whether in the burning sands of Egypt or in the snowy
steppes of Russia, in the marshy plains of Italy or in the highlands of
Spain, he always found him the same, and his notes and observations,
from his first government service on the Newfoundland coast to his last,
always showed him the same laborer and student in the field of medicine.
And yet at St. Helena we find Napoleon refusing to take remedies for
internal disease whose real nature was unknown, and only toward the end
did he consent to take anything, and then only when seeing that the end
was approaching, and more from a kindly desire to express his
appreciation of the services of his attendants, and not to wound their
feelings, than from any hope of assistance. Napoleon had not neglected
the study of medicine any more than he had the study of every other
science. This is evident from the instance related as taking place
during the march of the grand army from the confines of Poland into
Russia, in 1812, when dysentery became very prevalent, of his inviting
several of his favorite guard to his own table, where he experimented
on each particular grenadier with a specific form of diet, so as to
determine its cause and possible remedy. He did not look upon our
knowledge of pathology and our skill in diagnosis as being sufficiently
advanced or perfect to make him feel but that a treatment for an obscure
disease like his own would be pretty much a matter of guess-work.
Charles Reade, in his "Man and Wife," shows an intimate knowledge of
medical science where he philosophizes on the effects of an irregular
life and of over-physical training. His logic is sound science. Defoe
and Cervantes show a like intelligent insight as to medicine; and it was
not without reason that Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, advised a
student of medicine who entered his office as a student to begin the
study of medicine by the careful study of "Don Quixote," remarking that
he found it a work of great value, which he still often read. The works
of Bacon and of Adam Smith on "Moral Sentiments;" the famous treatise on
the "Natural History of Man," by the Rev. John Adams; the later works of
Buckle, Spencer, Darwin, Draper, Lecky, and other robust wielders of the
Anglo-Saxon pen, as well as the works of Montaigne, Montesquieu, La
Fontaine, and Voltaire, are all works that the medical man could
probably read with more profit than loss of time. In fact, either Hume,
Macaulay, or any philosophical work on history will furnish to the
physician additional knowledge of use in his profession. No physician
can afford to neglect any study that in any manner adds to his knowledge
of the natural history of man, as therein is to be found the foundation
of our knowledge as to what constitutes health, and as to what are the
causes that lead humanity to diverge from the paths of health into those
of physical degeneracy and mental and bodily disease.
We have in medicine many sayings which pass for truisms, which are,
after all, misleading. We say, for instance, keep the feet warm and the
head cool; this will not always either keep you comfortable or well, as
we know that in neuralgias it is absolutely necessary, either for
comfort or to get well, to keep the head warm. While so much stress is
laid on the necessity of keeping the head cool, a thing a person is sure
to look after whenever the head becomes uncomfortably warm, and to which
can be ascribed but few ailments or deaths, we hear comparatively
nothing about the thermometric condition of the perineum, which, from
the varying temperatures in which it is at times plunged, produces more
beginnings for diseases in the future, during youth and our prime, as
well as it quite often causes the sudden ending of life in more advanced
periods. People who carefully observe the rule of keeping their heads
cool and their feet warm will stand with outspread legs and uplifted
coat-tails with their backs to a blazing grate, and then, going outside,
incontinently sit down on a stone or iron door-step, or, stepping into a
carriage or other vehicle, they sit down on a cold oil-cloth or leather
cushion, without the least knowledge of the harm or danger that they are
liable to incur. They little dream of the prostatic troubles that lie in
wait for the unwary sitter on cold places, ready to pounce upon him like
the treacherous Indian lying in ambush,--troubles that carry in their
train all the battalions of urethral, bladder, kidney disease and
derangments, and subsequent blood disorganization, which often begin in
a chilled perineum, and, in conjunction with the local disease that may
result, end in handing us over to Father Charon for ferriage across the
gloomy Styx long before our life's journey is half over. It is true,
neither the savage of Africa or America nor the nomads of Asia are
subject to any of these troubles; but with us, hampered with all the
benefits of the dress, diet, habits, and luxuries of civilization, and
with a civilized prostatic gland, it is quite otherwise. Herein, again,
comes that connection between religion, morality, and medicine, that
existed with so much benefit to mankind, but from which we of later days
have, in our greater wisdom, seen fit to separate; although,
inconsistently as it may seem, the present age has done more than any
previous epoch in practically demonstrating the intimate and inseparable
relation existing between the physical and moral nature of man. The
persistent priapism which oftentimes results from riding with a wet seat
and the inordinate morbid sensibility of the sexual organs that may
result from the same cause or from spinal irritation are not to be
allayed by any homily on morality or on the sanctifying attempts at
keeping the animal passions under subjection, any more than will prayers
or offerings to all the gods of Olympus restore the eunuchized, either
through foolish civilized dress and customs or through excessive
indulgence. We must mix medicine with our religion and make the clergy
into physicians, or ordain our physicians into full-fledged clergymen.
The science of medicine, or what might be called the natural ways of
nature through its physical laws, is true to itself; the fault lies in
our interpretation of its phenomena, which we fail to study with
sufficient discriminative precision and nicety. We have repeatedly
mistaken causes and results from this want of close observance and of
precision, attributing results to causes which did not exist. As an
example, when the early disciples of homoeopathy in ancient Palestine
undertook to revive poor, old, withered King David, by putting him to
bed with a young and caloric-generating Sunamite maid, when it was by
like incontinent practices that he had brought himself to that state of
decrepitude, it is plain that they misunderstood the principle.
Boerhaave--who, as a true eclectic practitioner, followed these ancient
and Biblical homoeopaths in their practice in a similar case, the
subject being an old Dutch burgomaster, whom he sandwiched between a
couple of rosy Netherland maids--also failed to grasp the true condition
of the nature of things, or the true philosophical explanation. The
exhalations from the aged are by no means an elixir of health or life to
the young, and the fact that the young were apt to lose health by
sleeping with the aged was wrongly attributed to their loss being the
others' gain, and the result of its passing into the bodies of their
aged companions, and not to its true cause,--the deteriorating influence
to which they were subjected; and, further, when we analyze the subject
still more, we can understand how a full-blooded and active,
lithe-bodied, thin, and active-skinned Sunamite maid might and would
impart caloric to King David; but, from our knowledge (not altogether
practical) of the difference that exists between differently
constitutioned and differently built maids in imparting caloric, and
from our knowledge of the physique of the Netherland maids, who are cold
and impassive, with a layer of adipose tissue that answers the same
purpose as that of the blubber in the whale,--that of retaining heat and
resisting cold,--we can well believe that the poor, shriveled
burgomaster could receive but little heat, even when sandwiched between
the two; but, on the contrary, he was, in fact, more liable to lose the
little he had, unless we look at the subject in another light, and
consider that sentiment that is common to both animals and men of
spirit, a sentiment that has furnished the subject for more than one
canvas in the hands of the true and sympathetic artist, as seen on the
awakening and alert attitude of the worn-out and old decrepit war-horse,
browsing in an inclosed pasture, as he hears from afar the familiar
bugle-notes of his early youth, or some cavalry regiment with prancing
steeds and jingling accoutrements, with bright colors and shining arms,
going past the pasture, restoring for a time to the stiffening joints
and dim eyes the suppleness and fire of bygone times, with visions of
gallant charges and prancing reviews; or, how the same sentiment erects
once more the bowed and withering frame of the old veteran, and once
again fires his soul with the martial zeal of his prime as he sees the
passing colors and active-stepping regiment which he followed in the
bright sunshine and flush of his youth. Aside from these sentiments,
which might possibly have inspired David and the Dutch burgomaster with
an infusion of a new and transient good feeling, it is unquestionable
but that some heated brickbats or stove-lids, curocoa jugs or old stone
Burton ale-bottles filled with hot-water, would have been more effectual
in imparting warmth than either Sunamite or Netherland maids.
It is hard to reconcile the beliefs of some people or nations with their
manners and customs. For instance, there is the Turk; when a Jew becomes
a Mohammedan he is made to acknowledge that Jesus Christ, the son of
Mary, is the expected Messiah, and that none other is to be expected;
they know of Christ's speech on the cross, made to the repentant thief;
they believe in a heaven full of houris, with large black eyes and faces
like the moon at its full, in which all good Moslems are to have
continual rejoicings, and yet they go on performing the most barbarous
and inhuman forms of castration imaginable, which not only deprives its
victims of their virility, but subject more than three-fourths of those
operated upon to a painful death, and the remaining to a life of
continual misery. Have these poor subjects no right to future bliss, or
in what shape will they reach there? If the heavens of these eunuchisers
were like the heaven of Buddhism, or, as the Chinese call it, the
Paradise of the West, where, although all forms of sensual
gratifications are to be enjoyed, no houris are to be supplied to the
saints of Buddhism,--as even the women who enter this paradise must
first change their sex,--we might understand that, the genitals not
being needed in the eternal world, it might be considered a matter of
small moment to compel a man to go through this short and transient life
without them; but where a robust condition of the sexual organs is
suggested as one of the heavenly requisites, it would seem as if the
Turk would look upon the suffering, misery, and death that they cause,
in connection with the inhuman mutilation they inflict, with horror.
Doctrinal theology, whether in the East or West, is something
incomprehensible.