Julius Rosenbaum

“ Would it were possible to shut my ears to the fact that Vice in this age prevails to such a degree that Nature has had to yield to foul lusts, that men corrupted even to the length of suffering themselves to be treated as women are filled with lust towards their own sex; yet vice itself set some limit to its own excesses, and the last extremity of this lewdness was to have ruined one that might have grown into a man. But what a height of insanity is here! Young men are chosen as mistresses, and a man is called upon to endure the treatment proper to a woman. ”

“ Great and wonderful no doubt were the Communities of the Ancient world, beautiful the fine flower of graceful living, and high the level of philosophic and literary culture attained, consummate the artistic relics they have left us; but what a seamy side this same Classical Civilization had to show,—whatviii unspeakable abominations underlay its social life, what atrocities of foulness, cruelty and lust,—some of them flourishing under the sanction of Religion itself,—counterbalanced the virtues of wise citizenship and warlike valour and Stoic self-denial. ”

“ Doubtless it is a melancholy task for the Historian to follow up and reveal the moral degradation of Peoples and Nations even to its most revolting details, and the Ethical philosopher might find not a few objections to raise against an undertaking of the kind. None the less is the Physician compelled to search out under all forms the traces of Vice in its most secret hiding-places, and so fathom the nature of the Disease in each individual case ”

“ Thus men have themselves admitted that they are surpassed by brutes in chastity, and that the latter do not do violence to nature with a view to the gratification of their desires. Whereas your lusts nature cannot, though seconded by the aid of law, restrain within their due bounds, or stay them from overflowing like a river in flood and producing horrid abominations, a wild cataclysm and confusion of nature in matters of love. For men have had intercourse with she-goats and sows and mares, while women have been inflamed with mad love of male beasts. ”

“ It was not long before the old-fashioned Roman matron succumbed in the struggle with her for supremacy, and by dint of her only too successful endeavours to outdo the foreign courtesan in recherché vice and effrontery, became but the more despicable in the eyes of the proud Roman. She had indeed learned to be a mother, but not to love. At the same time the Roman himself, surrounded as he thus was by no softening influences, ceased not only to be a citizen of the state, but even to be a man at all ”

“ In such a condition of things it is really verging on the borders of folly to hope to give a dogmatic and decisive judgement as to the knowledge of Venereal disease possessed by the Physicians of Antiquity,—the more so as the extant medical Works have never once been adequately ransacked, as Naumann only the other day proved in the case of Galen. But of a surety it is easier to maintain the Ancients knew nothing of Venereal disease, than to devote the best part of a man’s life-time to the investigation, how much the Ancients did actually know about it! ”

“ And the blame lies rather with the body than with the mind in most cases, for the body has within it a great flame, which using up the fuel cast to it, does not for long lack much moisture, the watery humour of which is drawn off by intercourse with women, producing ticklings and gnashings with the teeth and unappeasable itchings. ”

“ With an embrace so chilling may no wife kiss me, or unripe maid with wheedling lips. But you,—you think yourself more attractive and more pleasing, you from whose dog-like nose a blue icicle hangs, whose beard is frozen stiff, such a beard as the Cilician shearer crops with his upward-pointing clippers from the chin of a Cinyphian he-goat. ”

“ Indeed the Phoenician women used in former times to prostitute themselves for hire in the temples of their idols and to offer up the gains of their fornication as first-fruits to the deities that were worshipped therein, deeming that in this way they won the favour and goodwill of their goddess. Moreover men, perverting their own proper nature, and no more enduring to be males, turned themselves into the likeness of women, supposing that by so doing they rendered a service most grateful and honourable to the Mother of the Gods. ”

“ When a vile bawd saw him naked from a window in the Suburra, she shuts her brothel up, and had rather kiss his middle than his head. The man who but now could penetrate every vessel of the inwards, and say with assured voice and certain knowledge whether it were a boy or a girl in the mother’s belly,—rejoice, rejoice, organs of women, for your business is done for you,—the same cannot erect a fornicating tongue. For at the very moment he is plunged tight in the swollen vulva, and hears the babes whimpering within, lo! a shocking disease paralyses his greedy tongue. ”

“ For perceiving that the Hebrews could be overcome in one fashion only, viz. through their violating the law by some terrible wrongdoing, he set himself, employing the bait of lust, to lead them on by way of fornication and incontinence, great offences in themselves, to the still greater crime of impiety. For this land, he said, oh! King, far excels all others in the beauty of its women; and by no other thing may men’s minds be so readily mastered as by a woman’s fairness. ”

“ A sensible man will neither seek to collect experiences on the point, nor yet on a practice, which it is true involves less, but still is sufficiently shameful, that of smearing a part of the body with excrement, because he has some hurt at that spot,—or with human seed. Xenocrates calls this latter commonly γόνος (seed, semen) , and distinguishes with minute care between cases where simple seed rubbed in by itself is of benefit, and cases where the female has the same effect after combination with the male, as it is discharged from the woman’s womb. ”

“ At any rate these men-women may be seen constantly strutting in the agora at the hour of high market, walking in procession at the sacred festivals, sharing, unholy as they are, in holy offices, participating in mysteries and sacrifices, even engaging in the rites of Demeter. Some of them have brought the charm of their youth to such a pass that craving a complete transformation into women, they have amputated their generative members ”

“ Now is it really in any way reasonable to expect the physicians of those times to have so completely extricated themselves from the predominant range of ideas? and have we any right to abuse them for their beliefs at the present moment, when in our own day there are to be found not a few physicians who deny absolutely the contagiousness of Venereal disease under its different forms? All the old practitioners could do was to draw attention to the fact that underlying the τὸ θεῖον there lurked some natural cause, and this view Hippocrates did actually maintain in his writings. ”

“ Good; but if a single disease of such a sort attacks a people that they all of them acquire women’s voices, and no man, neither stripling nor grey-beard, can utter a word in a man’s voice, is not this a horrible thing, and harder to bear, I should suppose, than any Plague? For it is not shameful to have a fever, nor even to die.
“Nay! but to speak with women’s voice is after all to speak with human voice, and no one is filled with aversion when he hears a woman. But, tell me, whose is this voice; does it not belong to the Androgyni (men-women) , the Cinaedi? ”

“ It is an undoubted fact that in this Europe of ours, though enjoying a more temperate climate, if intercourse is had with women during menstruation, the glans penis and prepuce are generally attacked by some little inflammation or by superficial pustules, which however soon disappear. What much more serious consequences then must we suppose threaten those who in a warmer climate, one steaming with heat, are not ashamed to make coition with women, whilst their menses are actually flowing, these being from the nature of the case exceedingly acrid and almost poisonous. ”

“ We cannot write the history of a single Man or of a single Nation so as to be a sufficient basis for the understanding and right appreciation of them, if we grasp only their inner history, that of their internal development, and consequently view them by themselves as a something separated off from all surroundings, instead of bearing in mind as we should the forms their relations take to environment, to the outer world generally,—in fact their external history. ”

“ If circumstances put it out of the power of the ancient Physicians to unite under one whole the separate forms of Venereal disease, to look at the morbid process in its entirety, it is no less self-evident that for the same reasons they could have found no occasion to invent a special name for a thing that was simply invisible to them. ”