![]() In this paper I intend to draw a picture of the reasons behind these medical practices. This becomes clear from several sources, and equivocally from a section of an ecclesiastical law dating from 325 CE which explicitly speaks of persons castrated by physicians on account of illness. Greco-Roman “healers” could be involved in castration practices for reasons beyond the medical scope, but castration performed by physicians could also – quite naturally – have been meant to cure people. Hadrian demanded a capital punishment for the patient as well as the executing physician ( Dig. In 127 CE, for instance, the emperor Hadrian issued a rescript forbidding anyone to castrate free or enslaved human beings, even if the operation had been performed on a consenting person, and also forbidding anyone to put themselves up for a voluntary castration. ![]() ![]() In many cases the actual castration will have been performed by laymen, but some sources show that sometimes medical practitioners were involved. ![]() As in the human past in general, in Greco-Roman antiquity there were boys and men who had been subjected to the elimination of the testicles, what we call castration. ![]()
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