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Martial, who laughs at everything, speaks of these singers sometimes breaking their ring, and says that it becomes necessary to send them to the fibula-makers in order to have the damage repaired: "Et cujus refibulavit turgidum, faber, penem, Il di cui turgido membro abbia fabro fibbiato." The practice of infibulation was very common in India, from religious motives.
In one of his pleasantries Martial says of these infibulated singers that they sometimes break their rings and fail to place them back "et cujus refibulavit turgidum faber peruem." Heinsius considers Agamemnon cautious when he left Demodocus near Clytemnestra, as he remarks that Demodocus was infibulated. For such purposes as the foregoing infibulation offered a more humane method than castration.
In Circassia the women were protected by a copper girdle or a corset of hide and skin which, according to custom, only the husband could undo. Peney speaks of infibulation for the preservation of chastity, as observed by him in the Soudan.
There can be little doubt but that excess of this description bastardized and corrupted the ancient Greeks and Romans, and that recourse was necessarily had to the fibula when the deities themselves set the example. Of what use, indeed, could be the moral lessons of a Plato or a Socrates, even when enforced by infibulation, if vice was thus sanctioned by divine example?
The infibulation of boys, sometimes on account of their voice, and not unfrequently, to prevent masturbation, was performed by having the prepuce drawn over the glans; it was then pierced, and a thick thread was passed through it, remaining there until the cicatrizing of the hole; when that took place, a rather large ring was then substituted, which was not removed but with the permission of the party ordering the operation.
This ancient custom of infibulation is occasionally seen at the present day in civilized countries, and some cases of infibulation from jealousy are on record. There is mentioned, as from the Leicester Assizes, the trial of George Baggerly for execution of a villainous design on his wife. In jealousy he "had sewed up her private parts."
Introcision appears to be confined to Australia. Infibulation is practiced in Northeastern Africa and by the Mohammedan Malays. The effect, and doubtless the purpose, of the first and second of these operations is to facilitate coition; the object of the third is to prevent coition until the proper time for it arrives.
Infibulation by a ring in the prepuce was used to prevent premature copulation, and was in time to be removed, but in some cases its function was the preservation of perpetual chastity.
It is said these holy persons were in some places so venerated that people came on their knees, and bowing below the ring, asked forgiveness possibly for sexual excesses. Rhodius mentions the usage of infibulation in antiquity, and Fabricius d'Aquapendente remarks that infibulation was usually practiced in females for the preservation of chastity.
Infibulation is not confined to the male sex exclusively, for it is practised on girls and women in India, Persia, and the East, generally, and most commonly consists in joining together the female sexual organ, or closing the labia of the vagina by a suture made with waxed thread, a small aperture being left for the egress of the urine and the menstrua.
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