appearance of the glands to the too
sudden and summary methods of the Cybelian clergy, who used a piece of
shell and an elaborately-performed castration. According to Paulus
AEgineta, this was a common practice of making eunuchs out of young boys
in the Orient, the mortality being hardly any; whereas the _taille a
fleur de ventre_, the favorite method for making eunuchs for harem
guards and attendants, and more suited to the jealous disposition of the
Turk, has a mortality of three out of every four, according to Chardin,
and of two out of every three, according to Clot Bey, the chief
physician of the Pasha,[36] and of nine out of ten, according to Bisson.
So prone to reach high offices were intelligent eunuchs that it is
related that parents were at times induced to treat their boys in the
manner above stated, that they might be on the highway to royal favor,
honor, and rank; such is the ennobling tendency of Oriental despotism,
polygamy, and harem life. On the same principle Europeans subjected
their boys to a like operation to fit them for a chorister life or the
stage, where fame and honor and wealth were to be found.

Medicine has been the butt of wits and philosophers, as well as of the
men who, from the profession, have gone into the ranks of literature.
Smollet, himself a physician, gives us an insight into our wandering and
erratic misapplication of our knowledge on therapeutics in "Peregrine
Pickle," where the poor painter, Pallet, is believed to be a victim of
hydrophobia. The learned opinion of the doctor, who explains the many
and various reasons by which he arrives at his diagnosis, the various
physical signs exhibited by the patient as being pathognomonic of the
disease, and his final venture with the contents of the _pot de
chambre_, as a diagnosis verifier, which he dashes in the patient's face
in preference to ordinary water on account of the medicinal virtues
contained in urine, which in the case seemed to him to have a peculiar
therapeutic value, is something worth reading, however ludicrous it all
sounds. There are few intelligent physicians but who have seen as
ridiculous performances, in what might be called medical gymnasts, that
equal, if not surpass, those of Smollet's doctor. Rabelais was also a
professional brother, who, equally with Smollet, attempted to waken up
the profession by his satires. Smollet was not only a physician, but in
his early life had seen some very active and practical work