In ten hours, the surgical resident Syd’s day at the hospital will be behind her and she will meet herself back in her apartment in Newark, propped among pillows beneath her puffy quilt upon her perfect topper after a lavender-scented bubble bath circled with votive candles.
Even with Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert playing in the background, she will be unable to diminish the adrenaline swamping her system, preoccupied as she is with Dr. Monetti’s virtuoso recital this morning as he performed the robot-assisted radical prostatectomy from the console of the Da Vinci Surgical System twelve feet removed from his patient.
A few more months, and it will be her there flying through a body.
A few more months, and that body will get to live beyond the cluster bomb leisurely detonating deep inside it by virtue of what she will have learned to do, and she will have caught up with the career that has been waiting for her down the road all these years.
In ten hours, Syd will reach for one of her surgical histories to help tamp down the hormone her adrenal gland won’t stop flinging into her and will watch herself reading about chapter seventeen in the book of Genesis, where a ninety-nine-year-old man one day for no discernible reason other than some putative voice muttering in his head picks up a stone and strikes his penis to remove the foreskin, then repeats the process on his son and his slaves. His descendants who break the covenant, mutters the putative voice, will be shunned.
Contemporary surgeons theorize that that old man, Abraham, may have been suffering from phimosis, a constriction of the prepuce caused by a chronic infection between it and the glans, quite possibly the result of desert dust that would have gotten into everything in Hebron, combined with a lack of protective underwear, comprehension of basic hygiene, and water resources for regular bathing.
Medieval artists became entranced by Abraham’s self-circumcision, how religion and politics married in his foreskin, the private and the public, how the male sexual organ converted into a site of divine meaning through self-inflicted agony.
Abraham and his wife Sarah’s next son, Isaac, was born several years after the deed, and his existence, those artists’ repeated depictions of the scene argue, is a living message sent into a time Abraham and Sarah won’t see.
In each rendering, the stone has been replaced with a knife, perhaps for purposes of decorum.
That knife and the attack upon the male reproductive organs it represents appear throughout surgical history, commencing when nature itself carves two scars into the male anatomy at birth. The first is the navel, the mark left after the umbilical cord is discarded. The second is the perineal raphe, the remnant of the embryonic development of the urethra that forms a midline ridge of tissue extending from the anus up the middle of the scrotum and base of the penis.
The extreme culmination of that attack is the act of castration, emblem of control and, surprisingly, artistic creation. While in modern surgery orchidectomy is most commonly deployed to treat a major injury or testicular cancer, and usually involves the removal of a single testis, or, in increasingly rare cases, removal of both to fight advanced prostate cancer by lowering testosterone levels in the body and hence slowing its spread, the procedure tracks back to ancient mythologies. Cronos, for instance, gelds his father Uranus in order to usurp his power. Driven to madness by Cybele, the Phrygian mother-goddess whose cult fanned out through Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome, the shepherd Attis emasculates himself beneath a pine tree. In some versions, he dies through blood loss. In others, he survives as a eunuch priest devoted to the divinity.
Attis’s action signifies spiritual purification, rebirth, and a transcendence of normative gender. It becomes a recurrent theme in such religious sects as the Valesians (about whom Gustave Flaubert writes in The Temptation of Saint Anthony), who in the second century AD castrated not only themselves, but also travelers they happened upon and guests who dropped by for a visit; the Eastern Orthodox Skoptsy, who from the late eighteenth century to the early Stalinist period believed human genitals were the mark of original sin and therefore must be lopped off; and Heaven’s Gate, whose members in the late twentieth century embraced neutering as a form of radical celibacy.
In China and other parts of Asia, castration once served as an alternative to execution for prisoners of war. The prisoners’ genitals were smeared with feces and chewed off by dogs. Given the probability of bleeding to death or succumbing to gangrene, in reality, the punishment became little more than an excruciatingly drawn-out murder by another name.
Elsewhere, however, eunuchs came to hold influential positions, from diplomats and treasurers to civil servants and generals. In the harems of kings, sultans, and emperors in Asia, Arabia, and the eastern Roman Empire, they were considered a privileged class. The earliest recorded incidence of deliberate castration to produce one dates back four thousand years to the Sumerian city of Lagash. In China, the eunuch system persisted thousands of years and through two dozen regimes (in the mid-seventeenth century, toward the end of the Ming Dynasty, nearly seventy thousand served the emperor), until 1911, when the final sovereign was deposed.
Sun Yaoting, the last known eunuch in the Chinese imperial court, died on the cusp of his ninety-fourth birthday in 1996. A landlord in their village set his family’s home ablaze and stole their land. Sun’s father reckoned he might gain royal influence, and thereby be in a position to take revenge upon the malefactor, if he were to make Sun into a eunuch to serve the court. So with a single razor slice—and without anesthesia—his father castrated his son on his eighth birthday. Unluckily, the emperor his father hoped to sway was ousted a few months later. Sun was nonetheless appointed attendant to the empress before the imperial family was expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924. He continued to serve until the end of World War II, his genitals preserved in a jar of vinegar as anatomical documentation until the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when they were thrown out with the trash because their presence was believed to embody the old reign’s decadence.
Like Sun’s father, slave traders in North Africa sometimes sheared off the penis and scrotum of their captives with a single slash before shipping them off to the New World colonies. They employed a knife rather than a razor. Afterward, a goose feather was inserted into the freshly transected urethra to keep it open. Glowing hot desert sand was poured over the gaping wound to stanch the flow of blood. If the captive didn’t die from hemorrhage or infection within a week or two, the traders reasoned his survival would stand as proof of his strength, which meant he would fetch a fine price in the colonies, where castration rather than hanging was used on black people as legal punishment for the attempted rape of a white woman, as well as a method to shape breeding among slaves, a technique adopted from animal husbandry.
Over time, approaches to castration were refined by surgeons to yield three types of eunuch: castrati, with no penis or scrotum; spadones, with no testicles but with a penis; and thlibiae, with crushed testicles.
By fabricating a sexless gender that stuttered between male and female, good Christians imagined they were in effect creating a subgenus of angel—that is, wondrous-looking beardless beings with male characteristics that mimicked The Lord’s servants. Just as in heaven, God preferred being surrounded by hosts of sexless, docile vassals, so on earth it was for rulers.
All the same, unpleasant complications entailed in severing an individual’s penis and/or scrotum pestered. On the one hand, what was left of the urethra tended to scar over and close up, leading to difficulties in micturition. On the other, damage to the urethral sphincter meant one could no longer retain one’s urine. Accordingly, eunuchs leaked continuously, drop by drop.
The workaround was a metal rod inserted into the urethra to close it off and prevent it from narrowing.
Because depletion of testosterone in the wake of castration tended to lead to the growth of breast tissue and the onset of early osteoporosis, which in turn caused spontaneous compression of the vertebrae, eunuchs could always be recognized by the sour smell of urine accompanying them, a crooked posture, a smooth face, female breasts, and a singsong voice.
All the same, those around them noted they tended to live a good deal longer than average males—often more than ten or fifteen years. Some philosophers saw this as divine recompense for the eunuch’s earthly sacrifices, while others read it as The Redeemer’s mocking prolongation of the eunuch’s servile misery.
From 1935 through the end of the World War II, Nazis persecuted gay people under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which in 1871 outlawed what it referred to as unnatural fornication between men. The core prohibition persisted in West Germany until 1969 and resulted in fifty thousand convictions between 1945 and then, a number similar to that achieved during the Third Reich.
(The law wasn’t repealed completely until 1994.)
It was the Nazi judicial system, though, that introduced castration into German legal practice. As early as 1933, courts were able to order mandatory gelding of a homosexual man, but only with the man’s consent. This was attained by granting him early release from prison if he agreed to the removal of his genitals.
In 1933, The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Heredity Diseases authorized forced sterilization of all individuals deemed by the law feebleminded. The term applied to individuals exhibiting everything from schizophrenia and manic depression to alcoholism, blindness, deafness, and physical deformities—the latter of which covered, among other things, being bi- or multiracial. At first, the preferred method of sterilization was vasectomy, although it wasn’t long before logic pointed out maintaining such individuals continued to cost the state money and space.
Other, more permanent solutions were thus put into practice.
The Third Reich based their laws on those already extant in the United States—laws aimed at improving the genetic quality of the species by preventing the unfit (the U.S. law’s term) from reproducing. Nourished by the biological determinist theories devised in the late nineteenth century by the English polymath Sir Francis Galton, and funded by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harriman railroad fortune, and the cereal-magnate J. H. Kellogg’s Race Betterment Foundation, Indiana passed the world’s first eugenics law in 1907. Thirty-one states quickly followed suit.
The Rockefeller Foundation also helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one Josef Mengele worked in before moving on to Auschwitz, where the doctor stood on the platform as the prisoners stepped off the trains in order to personally select his experimental subjects. He always kept an eye out for young twins, since he realized by using them in his investigations he could disentangle the relative impacts of nature versus nurture. Along with euthanasia, genetic manipulation, the injection of chemicals into the eyes to change their color to Aryan blue, and the creation of artificial conjoined twins, castration of what the Reich labeled subhumans became common practice at Auschwitz, as did sterilization research utilizing iodine, X-rays, and silver nitrate. Given the added expense it incurred, no anesthesia was administered even when harvesting organs from a living body. At The Doctors Trial in Nuremberg, the accused cited American eugenics laws in their defense.
In the U.S., the mentally ill, individuals with cognitive disabilities, the physically handicapped, criminals, and African American, Asian American, and Native American communities were targeted from the outset. Soon the poor were added to the list because poverty was seen as a symptom of both cerebral and physical failure. Intellectuals of the Progressive Era—W. E. B. Du Bois and academics at such black institutions as Tuskegee University, Howard University, and Hampton University among them—championed the cause.
In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Virginia’s forced sterilization law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing that allowing what he referred to as imbeciles to procreate flew in the face of reason.
It was essential, he wrote, that a government prevent its nation from being swamped by incompetence.
Although sexual acts between two men were considered criminal offenses in England until 1967, Alan Turing, the mathematician responsible for developing an early version of the computer that cracked the Enigma code, thereby providing crucial intelligence that helped the Allies win World War II, never kept his preferences secret at Kings College in Cambridge, which at the time was held as an oasis of acceptance.
In December 1951, Alan, thirty-nine, bumped into a nineteen-year-old homeless man named Arnold Murray on the street outside the Regal Cinema in Manchester. Alan invited Arnold to lunch. Within weeks, they had thrown themselves into what the English termed at the time The Italian Vice. In late January 1952, Alan’s house was burgled. Arnold told Alan he thought he knew the burglar, which prompted Alan to report the crime to the police. During the investigation, Alan gave a statement that was unapologetic about his relationship with Arnold. Two months later, he was arrested and charged with indecency.
Alan was convicted and presented with a choice: either a prison sentence of up to fourteen years, or chemical castration by means of a series of synthetic estrogen injections over the course of twelve months. He chose the latter, which left him impotent and sporting female breasts. Although he was able to keep his academic post, he lost his security clearance and was barred from continuing his cryptographic consultancy work. Regardless, in public, he retained his pithy, defiant humor about his situation.
In private, it was a different story.
On June 8, 1954, Alan’s housekeeper stumbled across his body in his bed, a half-eaten apple shot through with cyanide beside him.
Castration also led to an unexpected cultural boom lasting hundreds of years: a musical flourish in Europe—and especially in Italy—from the mid-seventeenth century through the early twentieth in the form of neutered singers, whose voices made them into the globe’s first musical superstars. Rich, vain, and often ungainly, they commanded any opera house in which they appeared and mingled comfortably with the nobility. High-born, decadent women on the lookout for something exotic flocked to their sides.
Early emasculation blocks the larynx’s size increase that otherwise produces the characteristic Adam’s apple in adult men and with it males’ characteristic vocal deepening. In order to prevent the change, those invested in aural purity gelded boys sometime between their seventh and ninth years. They developed an unusual high-pitched singing voice broadly comparable to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto, yet covering a strikingly wide range. There is no equivalent in the larger world.
From the start, the Roman Catholic Church played a decisive role in this biological artistry. By 1558, castrati were included in the Sistine Chapel’s choir, an essential move after the Vatican banned women from singing in it. In 1589, Pope Sixtus V reorganized the choir of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome to explicitly include castrati. Handel, Mozart, and other Baroque and Classical composers wrote roles for them into their operas and oratorios.
By the late nineteenth century, however, public opposition to the idea put enough pressure on Pope Leo XIII that in 1878 he prohibited employment of new castrati by the Roman Catholic Church, and in 1903 Pope Pius X pronounced an end to the practice.
Possibly the most famous castrato was Carlo Broschi, who adopted the stage name Farinelli. He lived from 1705 to 1782 and was gelded as a boy because of the promise his musical parents felt his voice held. Farinelli went on to become a sensation in Rome, Vienna, London, Paris, and Madrid, with a vocal reach that spanned from the A below middle C to the D above high C.
In 1737 the Spanish king, Philip V, offered him the prestigious position of chamber musician at court. The king’s wife, Elisabeth, noticed Farinelli’s singing provided relief for Philip V from his bouts of brutal depression. So every night after the royal dinner, they had the man they thought of as their caged canary sing for them and their guests until Philip’s death nine years later.
On the accession of Philip’s son, Ferdinand VI, Farinelli’s influence only increased. But in 1759 Ferdinand was succeeded by his half-brother Charles III, who couldn’t have cared less for musical entertainment. He disbanded the opera and discharged Farinelli, although granting him his full salary for the rest of his life. Farinelli returned to Italy where he lived out his days at the beautiful villa he had built near Bologna, visited by the likes of Mozart and Casanova, yet increasingly lonely as he survived most of his friends and former colleagues. He died in 1782 at the age of seventy-eight.
In 2011, a team of forensic anthropologists published a report on his exhumed skeleton. Although it was poorly preserved, examination revealed features that were consistent with the effects of castration, among which were strikingly long limb-bones, incomplete bone fusion, and low bone density. From the length of an ulna from the lower right arm, the team estimated Farinelli’s height at in impressive six feet, three inches. The team further observed the front end of his skull cap was severely affected by hyperostosis frontalis interna—a condition in which the inner surface of the frontal bones is symmetrically thickened, a condition common in postmenopausal women, but not men.
The last castrato employed by the Vatican, Alessandro Moreschi, known as the Angel of Rome, was, unlike Farinelli, short and plump. It is likely his impoverished parents sold him to the Church in the hopes that he—and therefore they—would become wealthy. A talent scout, Nazareno Rosati, brought Alessandro to Rome, had him castrated, and enrolled him as a pupil at the Scuola di San Salvatore, where he was taught by Gaetano Capocci, maestro di cappella of the Papal basilica of Saint John Lateran.
At fifteen, Alessandro was appointed First Soprano in the basilica choir and became a regular member of the soloists hired by Capocci to sing in the salons of Roman high society. In short order, he was named the First Soprano of the Sistine Chapel Choir and gained a reputation for parading like a pudgy peacock in a long white scarf among the crowds after a concert, waiting to be congratulated and praised.
He was the only castrato to make solo recordings. In the Vatican in the spring of 1902, he laid down the first of seventeen tracks for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company of London—Gounod’s arrangement of Bach’s Ave Maria. The aural result is ghostly, alien, ethereal, Alessandro’s sense of pitch unsteady. One can also hear how he afflicted his singing with a constant exaggerated vibrato, which he believed divinely expressive.
The year after that recording was made, Pope Pius X dictated that the roles of sopranos and contraltos in the choir must be taken by boys. This meant Alessandro and his few remaining comrades were quietly pensioned off. In retirement, he lived an unexceptional life in a nondescript apartment near the Vatican, dying there of pneumonia in 1922 at the age of sixty-three.
It is difficult not to find oneself asking what thoughts must have accosted Alessandro’s mind as he lay there on his deathbed, knowing what the last pterodactyl, mastodon, or Neanderthal couldn’t have known about itself: that he was the last of his species.
Is it possible he understood that answers only call on the young, that by one’s forties they begin to drop away, and in the end, there are none left at all?
That astonishingly appealing acoustics always conquer death until they don’t?
Could he have wondered just for a moment in his apartment near the Vatican in what sense when something disappears—like friendship, say, or love, or optimism, or serenity—was it really there to begin with?
As disappearance itself enters the body against the body’s will that that which didn’t exist is in fact somehow even more solidly preserved, more thoroughly present, than when it was there but only as an abstract invisibility?
Yet in ten hours and twenty minutes, Syd won’t reach the termination of that sentence, which maybe exists a little on the page, a little in her waning imagination, because Syd will be heavying.
She will be heavying.
And then she will be dreaming, though about what Syd won’t be able to recall in the morning’s bright chill.
