EARLIER this year, a gentleman brought an action against a hair replant company and a Co Cork doctor over a baldness cure which, he claimed, failed to work despite the fact that he had paid out £875 of his hard earned money in the hope that it would.
In the course of the court proceedings, a (female) dermatologist gave evidence to the court which seemed to indicate that it was unwise to pin one's hopes on such procedures and concluded with the following: "Balding is a sign of maleness. Male pattern baldness is a hormonal problem. If you are castrated, you do not go bald."
Somewhere around the sixth last word of the last sentence, most males are likely to have given an involuntary wince. Male pattern baldness is, it must be said, something most of us would rather avoid. The increase in one's forehead acreage at the expense of one's manly thatch is a considerable misfortune, leaving one open to painful sunburn or heat loss, depending upon the season, and the equally painful realisation that one is, slowly but surely, turning into a slaphead. But castration is not a solution with which most of us will be entirely comfortable. In the castration/ hair loss debate, castration generally loses out due to a number of factors, of which pain is not the least substantial.
With the exception of the most unfortunate of accidents, castration is not a factor of any great relevance to modern living or, indeed, a means of achieving any particular end.
Extraordinary singers
We have become quite squeamish about castration - not without just cause, it must be said - but our difficulties with it were not shared to the same degree by our predecessors. Most famously, castration was used to create the most extraordinary singers that the world has ever known, the castrati, adult males with soprano or alto voices.
For nearly 230 years the castrati dominated the European stage, primarily in Italy, which operated as a kind of castrato production line. "There are many castrati in Italy," sniffed the Dictionnaire de l'Academie Francaise in 1773, not without justification.
The centre of the castration industry in Italy was Norcia, a small town near Assisi where lopping off a young chap's equipment appears to have been an extraordinarily popular pastime, right up there with bearbaiting and attacking the neighbours. Bologna, by contrast, was where the most expert surgical cast rations were performed at relatively high financial cost but with a considerably lower mortality rate.
Excellent young male singers might have made a greater effort to hide their gifts if they had known what they were letting themselves in for. Evidence of even a fairly rudimentary gift for singing was sufficient to lead to castration, which prevented the voice from breaking. Some children actually asked to be castrated, since the great castrati enjoyed a degree of wealth and fame unimaginable to many.
Secret operations
In most cases, though, there was some convincing required of both the parents and the subject. The operations were generally performed in secret and families would rarely admit to creating a castrato, preferring instead to blame his obvious abnormality on those old staples of childhood genital deformity, the bad fall or the accidental kick of a horse. Dr Charles Burney, an English traveller, wrote in his 1771 treatise The Present State of Music in France and Italy, that "the Italians are so ashamed of this practice that each province blames another for it".
The real problem for a putative castrato began, not surprisingly, with the procedure itself, the orchidectomy. In some cases, surgeons were on hand to do the deed with the maximum care possible, or at least as much care as they took with anything in the 17th and 18th centuries. Where a surgeon wasn't immediately to hand, there was usually one other person with the necessary equipment to perform the procedure. Enter the village barber: a village barber's shop frequently doubled as a dentist's surgery and a doctor's practice, which gives a whole new meaning to the colours on a barber's pole.
Primitive anaesthetics
Anaesthetics were still at what might charitably be described as a primitive stage in the 17th century. The best that could be hoped for was a dose of opium to deaden one's reactions but here, once again, the barbershop principle came into operation and anything which served to reduce the pain, including immersion in icy baths following compression of the carotid arteries, was considered fair practice.
Mortality rates were high, varying from 10 per cent among the most experienced surgeons to 80 per cent among barbers. The operation was generally performed between the ages of seven and twelve and consisted of an incision made in the groin through which the spermatic cord and the testicles were removed. A knife was then duly applied and the severed ducts were tied.
Unlike eunuchs, castrati did not have their sexual organs removed entirely and most enjoyed relatively normal sexual relations once they got over the initial shock which, frankly, is a big "once".
The operation not only transformed the castrato's voice but also resulted in physical and psychological changes. Castrati lacked an Adam's apple and had very little body hair. Some grew breasts due to the over activation of female hormones caused by the absence of testosterone. They developed fatty deposits and a muscle mass similar to a woman's and, to complete a rather nasty collection of physical quirks, most were extraordinarily tall, again due to lack of testosterone which led to an over active pituitary gland.
The official Church view of castration was that those who performed such operations could be excommunicated. But, unofficially, its view veered between neutrality and general approval. In the end, it settled on a policy of condemning castration while recruiting the best castrati for itself.
In 1599, the first Italian castrati were admitted to the Papal Choir, provoking an outcry from the Spaniards - some of whom may well have been castrati themselves - who viewed the Papal Choir as their pitch and weren't going to have it queered by anyone.
Castrati continued to frequent the stages of Europe until the 19th century, some with an incredible longevity. Farinelli, perhaps the most famous of all, was still singing until his death at the age of 77.
In common with all of the castrati, he also kept his hair.