History of circumcision, from the earliest times to the present : moral and physical reasons for its performance, with a history of eunuchism, hermaphrodism, etc., and of the different operations practiced upon the prepuce / by P.C. Remondino.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History of circumcision, from the earliest times to the present : moral and physical reasons for its performance, with a history of eunuchism, hermaphrodism, etc., and of the different operations practiced upon the prepuce / by P.C. Remondino. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    contemplating the early Christians forced to worship in the catacombs of Rome, hunted like wild animals in their subterranean burrows, and then given the choice of making offerings to the heatlien gods or being thrown into the arena as prey to wild beasts; so are we stirred when we think of the Spanish Jew, who had made Spain his home for centuries, being driven into exile in such droves that no country could receive them; we see them perishing of hunger by the thousands on the African coast, and dying of starvation on the quays of the ports of civilized Italy. That many, through all these trials, were forced to embrace other religions is not astonishing. In Spain apostacy was to no purpose, as the Inquisition could not be expected to split hairs in regard to an apostate Jew, when it sent the best of Gothic blood, raised in the Catholic faitli, to the auto da fe or the scaffold,—the rack respecting neither faith nor pro- fession that fell into its clutches. In milder persecu- tions, however, he escaped by outwardly conforming to the demands of his oppressors ; and history tells us of the circumcisions secretly performed on the dead Jew, that the spirit of the law of their fathers might be carried out. In other cases, threatened exile, confiscation, or ex- orbitant taxation drove them to adopt every possible ex- pedient to eradicate the sign of their Israelitism and make attempts to reform a prepuce. The first attempts iu tliis line were made during the reign of Antiochus, when a number of Hebrews wished to become as the people about them who were not persecuted—/eceruni cibi prseputia. This is no easy operation, and in later times by the aid of appliances, both in Rome and in Spain, they undertook to cause the skin to recover the glans. Martial, in speaking of the instrument used in Rome, a sort of a long funnel-shaped copper tube in