Emeritus Professor of Endocrinology St. Georges Hospital Medical School SW17 ORE London, United Kingdom
To the editor:
I read with great interest the paper "Long-term consequences of castration in men: lessons from the Skoptzy and the eunuchs of the Chinese and Ottoman courts," published in December 1999 (1). However, the authors are at fault when, in the last paragraph, they state that the "so-called" castrati singers were a heterogenous group containing only a few singers who had their testes removed or crushed. As I have previously indicated (2), castration was, indeed, performed on a very large scale in Italy specifically to satisfy the ever increasing demand for the unique castrato voices, reaching its peak in the mid 18th century when, according to the great authority on the castrato, Franz Haböck, as many as 4000 castrations were carried out annually (3). It is, unfortunately, not true that only those with extraordinary singing ability were chosen for the procedure. Only a few reached the top opera houses, many sang in ordinary church choirs, and there were many whose mutilation was to no purpose. The castrati nearly all came from poor families in Italy, and fathers permitted the operation in the hope (only too often misplaced) that fame and fortune achieved by being a great castrato would come to them and their poverty-stricken families.
The castrati singers flourished over a century and a half before the medical studies on the Skoptzy or the Chinese and Ottoman eunuchs were carried out. Moreover, despite its popularity in the 18th century, the practice of producing castrati was strictly illegal, according to the canon law of the Roman Church, and every effort was made to keep the identity of the operators and their origin vague. Euphemisms were used to account for the existence of a particular castrato such as disease of the testes or accidental injurybeing gored by a wild boar was a favorite reason! It is clear, however, that unlike the groups discussed in the present paper, only the testes were removed; total removal of all the genitalia was never carried out. Only a handful of castrati lived on into the early years of the 20th century, in the Vatican, but 18th century descriptions of the appearances of the castrati include, in addition to the powerful high-pitched singing voice of a strange quality, tallness of stature, smooth beardless face, rounding of the hips, enlargement of the breasts, and a tendency to obesityall features we would associated with isolated spontaneous hypogonadism. The sole object was, of course, the preservation of the unbroken voice, and in the only recorded postmortem examination of a castrato the dimensions of the larynx were strikingly small with the vocal cords the length of a female high soprano (4).
With reference to the effect of castration on longevity, a study I carried out on a group of castrated compared with intact singers born at similar times showed that life-span was unchanged (2).
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