The movement in favor of castration appears to have begun in the United States, where various experiments have been made in embodying it in law.  It was first advocated merely as a punishment for criminals, and especially sexual offenders, by Hammond, Everts, Lydston and others.  From this point of view, however, it seems to be unsatisfactory and perhaps illegitimate.  In many cases castration is no punishment at all, and indeed a positive benefit.  In other cases, when inflicted against the subject’s will, it may produce very disturbing mental effects, leading in already degenerate or unbalanced persons to insanity, criminality, and anti-social tendencies generally, much more dangerous than the original state.  Eugenic considerations, which were later brought forward, constitute a much sounder argument for castration; in this case the castration is carried out, by no means in order to inflict a barbarous and degrading punishment, but, with the subject’s consent, in order to protect the community from the risk of useless or mischievous members.

The fact that castration can no longer be properly considered a punishment, is shown by the possibility of deliberately seeking the operation simply for the sake of convenience, as a preferable and most effective substitute for the adoption of preventive methods in sexual intercourse.  I am only at present acquainted with one case in which this course has been adopted.  This subject is a medical man (of Puritan New England ancestry) with whose sexual history, which is quite normal, I have been acquainted for a long time past.  His present age is thirty-nine.  A few years since, having a sufficiently large family, he adopted preventive methods of intercourse.  The subsequent events I narrate in his own words:  “The trouble, forethought, etc., rendered necessary by preventive measures, grew more and more irksome to me as the years passed by, and finally, I laid the matter before another physician, and on his assurances, and after mature deliberation with my wife, was operated on some time since, and rendered sterile by having the vas deferens on each side exposed through a slit in the scrotum, then tied in two places with silk and severed between the ligatures.  This was done under cocaine infiltrative anaesthesia, and was not so extremely painful, though what pain there was (dragging the cord out through the slit, etc.) seemed very hard to endure.  I was not out of my office a single day, nor seriously disturbed in any way.  In six days all stitches in the scrotum were removed, and in three weeks I abandoned the suspensory bandage that had been rendered necessary by the extreme sensitiveness of the testicles and cord.

“The operation has proved a most complete success in every way.  Sexual functions are absolutely unaffected in any way whatsoever.  There is no sense of discomfort or uneasiness in the sexual tract, and what seems strangest of all to