The "Mika" or "Kulpi" operation of the Australian aboriginals / by T.P. Anderson Stuart.

  • Anderson Stuart, Thomas Peter, 1856-1920.
Date:
[1896?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The "Mika" or "Kulpi" operation of the Australian aboriginals / by T.P. Anderson Stuart. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    The «'M1KA or KULPI OPERATION op the AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINALS. By T. P. Anderson Stuart, m.d., Professor of Physiology in the University of Sydney. [With Plate YI.] [Read before the Royal Society of N. S. Wales, June 3, 1896.'] It was Miklouho-Maclay who appears to have been the first to adopt the term Mika.^ Howitt proposes to give the name kulpi to the operation from the name given to the initiate among the Dierie blacks of the Cooper's Creek district.^ The custom was first noticed by Eyre,^ in the country around the Great Australian Bight : it practically consists in, generally at the age of puberty, cutting the lower wall of the urethra so that it is slit completely open from below, the cleft sometimes extending only half way back, sometimes the whole way back to the scrotum. The organ then is no longer a tube. Sometimes a mere perforation is made as hereafter noted. 1 Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie, Bd. xii., 1880, Verhandl. p. 86. 2 Journ. Anthrop. Inst, xx., p. 85. 3 Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, 1840-41, 2 vols., London, 1845.