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Updated: June 15, 2025
Nothing will contribute more to harmonious adjustment for these sufferers than recognition of the fact that we are all, more or less, partial hermaphrodites. The complete or total hermaphrodite we define as the individual who possesses the reproductive organs of the male and the female, both testes and ovaries.
There were then not men and women only, but also hermaphrodites; in other words, beings in whom the two sexes were combined. These three kinds of human beings possessed four arms, four legs, and two faces. They were robust and rotated rapidly on their own axes, just like wheels.
The accompanying illustrations show the conformation of the parts before operation with all the appearance of ill-developed male genitalia, and the appearance afterward with restitution of the vaginal opening. Virchow in 1872, Boddaert in 1875, and Marchand in 1883 report cases of duplication of the genitalia, and call their cases true hermaphrodites from an anatomic standpoint.
These Intrigues being very remarkable, I thought fit to insert them for the Entertainment of the curious Reader; I now proceed to the Nature and Generation of Hermaphrodites. Of the material Cause and Generation of Hermaphrodites There are several Reasons assign'd by Naturalists for the Cause and Production of Hermaphrodites.
Though in Ovid's Metamorphosis, Salmacis's being in Love with Hermaphroditus, and not succeeding in her amorous Wishes, her praying to the Gods to join their Bodies in one, has no Weight in it; yet, that the Notions of Hermaphrodites are not entirely fictitious, I need only mention the Servant of Montuus, who took his Hermaphrodite to be a Male when he lay with his Maids, and for a Female when she lay with her Husband to propagate their Species, the two Hermaphrodites of Licetus, and the Story of Ausonius, which he relates of an Hermaphrodite of Bonavento in Italy; and Histories are full of Confirmations, that many Persons in the World have had the privy Parts of both Sexes.
However, in spite of the revolting nature of this vice, it has been a favourite one with several great men. It was well-known to the Ancients, and those who indulged in it were called Hermaphrodites, which symbolises not a man of two sexes but a man with the passions of the two sexes.
It must have struck most naturalists as a strange anomaly that, in the case of both animals and plants, species of the same family and even of the same genus, though agreeing closely with each other in almost their whole organisation, yet are not rarely, some of them hermaphrodites, and some of them unisexual.
His account of the pretended varieties of the human race, as of nations of Hermaphrodites, and others equally ridiculous, which he places in separate islands of the Indian ocean, are mere transcripts from Pliny. His accounts of Mangi and Kathay, or southern and northern China, are most inaccurately stolen from Marco Polo, and disguised or rather disfigured to conceal the theft.
There is still another class of animals, which are termed vermes by Linnæus, which are without feet, or brain, and are hermaphrodites, as worms, leeches, snails, shell-fish, coralline insects, and sponges; which possess the simplest structure of all animals, and appear totally different from those already described.
As has been remarked earlier in these pages, there is rarely if ever true hermaphroditism in higher animals i.e., cases of two functional sexes in the same individual. See, for example, Alienist and Neurologist for August, 1916, and New York Medical Journal for Oct. 23, 1915. It has been claimed that both human and higher mammalian "hermaphrodites" have actually functioned for both sexes.
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