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2 0 The idea that surgery could be used to eradicate sexual deviance and the mental illness it was thought to cause was not uncommon among doctors in the nineteenth century, though it was controversial. For example, J. H. Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, believed that “imbecility and idiocy” resulted from “that solitary vice,” masturbation. He described one frustrated father who took matters into his own hands and castrated his offending son for such behavior. “The remedy was efficient,” noted Dr. Kellogg, drily adding , “though scarcely justifiable.”¹ Experimental surgery on both women and men had also been performed in a number of institutions, but the medical and legal communities often opposed it. The outcry that arose following an 1893 report by the Pennsylvania State Hospital for the Insane was typical. Dr. Joseph Price operated on four women there, removing their ovaries in the hopes of restoring their sanity. Fifty other patients were scheduled for the operation. The legal advisor to the Pennsylvania Board of Charities Lunacy Committee declared that surgeons were at risk for criminal prosecution and condemned the proposed operations on poor, mentally ill women as “illegal and unjustifiable.” The Journal of the American Medical Association concurred, noting that most medical superintendents in mental hospital settings regarded with disfavor “the castration of a woman as a cure for mental disorders.”² Not all physicians agreed with this opinion. At least a few believed that if “surgeons of acknowledged skill and integrity” advised the operation, a court order should be sought to perform it. This option seemed particularly expedient in cases where the insanity was of “a markedly erotic type,” such that both the woman and the public would be safeguarded.³ Regardless of the patient’s gender, to some doctors surgery seemed the proper prescription for unseemly sexuality. Several began to operate for “therapeutic” reasons long before surgery was legally authorized. In 1890, Kansas physician Dr. F. Hoyt Pilcher gained attention for castrating fiftySex and Surgery 2 Sex and Surgery | 2 1 eight children—forty-four boys and fourteen girls—in the Winfield, Kansas , Institution for Feebleminded Children.⁴ Pilcher’s surgeries were also an attempt to deal with masturbation, thought to be a contributor to mental deficiency.⁵ An asylum physician in Virginia also reported that masturbation had been connected to “mental disturbance.” Doctors in his state had attempted “heroic measures” such as castration as a “cure” for the practice without producing promising results.⁶ Some doctors operated as therapy for epilepsy. Dr. Everett Flood reported twenty-six cases of “asexualization” in his Massachusetts asylum for epileptics , with circumcision of some men being provided as additional “treatment .” Flood claimed that the surgery decreased the number of epileptic seizures, eradicated the sexual appetite, and helped one “solitary” inmate to develop “a more social disposition.” It was also said to cure kleptomania.⁷ Pennsylvania’s Dr. Isaac Kerlin operated not only to curb an “epileptic tendency” in the patient but also to remove her “inordinate desires which [were] . . . an offense to the community.” He challenged states to take the lead in legalizing surgery “for the relief and cure of radical depravity.”⁸ Kerlin ’s assistant Martin Barr surveyed sixty-one institutions in an attempt to discern whether a consensus existed on what surgical technique should be used to stop procreation and to whom it might be applied. The majority of those who replied favored castration, although most respondents were understandably coy when asked whether they had actually performed the surgery themselves. Fully three-fourths gave their “unqualified approval” to the proposal that surgery should be legally authorized.⁹ In some cases, sexual surgery was clearly proposed to prevent reproduction . An 1897 Michigan bill called for “asexualization” of three-time felons, rapists, and male or female inmates of the Michigan Home for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic. The frank and simple object of the proposed operation was to insure “that such persons shall cease to reproduce their kind.” The proposed law was sent to asylum and prison superintendents in the United States and Canada as well as three hundred physicians. Almost two hundred responded, all but eight favorably. The bill was passed by the Michigan House of Representatives but fell six votes short of passage by the Michigan Senate. A similar bill was introduced in Kansas, but it also failed.¹⁰ Clearly, at the end of the nineteenth century castration was practiced on an experimental basis in many institutions, and its use was under “earnest discussion” for a variety of ailments related...

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