Curious cases of flagellation in France : considered from a legal, medical and historical standpoint with reference to analogous cases in England, Germany, Italy, America, Australia and the Soudan.

Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Curious cases of flagellation in France : considered from a legal, medical and historical standpoint with reference to analogous cases in England, Germany, Italy, America, Australia and the Soudan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    as, overcome with lustful, murderous fury, she tears him in pieces and sets her dogs on him: * She strikes, tearing the armour from his body; they set their teeth in his white breast,—she and her dogs, the rivals, Oxus and Sphynx, —they on the right side, she on the left; and as I ap- proached blood dripped from her hands and mouth.” And later, when Penthesilea becomes satiated: “ Did I kiss him to death? No. Did I not kiss him? Torn in pieces? Then it was a mistake; kissing rhymes with biting, and one who loves with the whole heart might easily mistake the one for the other.* (*) 3-MOS^ncratlC ^flagellation. Amongst curious instan- ces of flagellation which, in the absence of a better name, we term “ idiosyncratic8 we cite the following. A very extraordinary case which reminds us very much of the old fellow in Dickens’ “ Tale of Two Cities,8 of an old man, confined in the Bastille, to whom flagellation had become a second nature, is recorded by De Rennevllle. (2) Seeing a birch-rod on the chimney-piece, he enquired whether it was not kept to chastise a dog then in the room. “‘No,’ said our ferocious Philosopher, ‘it is the violin of this old fool,1 pointing out to me the ancient Doctor of the Faculty. And of a sudden, this barbarous Corrector, seized a formidable bundle of rods: ‘ Come along at once ’, said he, to the puerile old man, ‘and no answering back, (') In the latest literature we find the matter treated, but particularly in Sacher-Masoch’s novels, which are hereafter to be alluded to, and in Ernest von Wildenbruch’s ' Brunhilde;* Rachilde’s * La Marquise de Sade,* etc. (!) L’Inquisition Fbanijoise, ou VHistoire de la Bastille, vol. Ill, p. 256, a curious woodcut illustrates the scene.