MUTILATION....(DEFINED).

The wounding, maiming and disfiguring of the body

is a practice common among savages and

systematically pursued by many entire races.

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Mutilations of the sexual organs are more ethnically important than any.They have played a great part in human history, and still have much significance in many countries. Their antiquity is undoubtedly great, and nearly all originate with the idea of initiation into full sexual life. The most important, circumcision, has been transformed into a religious rite. Infibulation (Lat. fibula, a clasp), or the attaching a ring, clasp, or buckle to the sexual organs, in females through the labia majora, in males through the prepuce, was an operation to preserve chastity very commonly practised in antiquity. At Rome it was in use; Strabo says it was prevalent in Arabia and in Egypt, and it is still native to those regions (Lane, Modern Egyptians, i. 73; Arabic Lexicon, s.v. "hafada"). Niebuhr heard that it was practised on both shores of the Persian Gulf and at Bagdad (Description de l'Arabie, p. 70). It is common in Africa (see Sir H. H. Johnston, Kilimanjaro Expedition, 1886), but is there often replaced by an operation which consists in stitching the labia majora together when the girl is four or five years old. Castration is practised in the East to supply guards for harems, and was employed in Italy until the time of Pope Leo XIII. to provide "soprani" for the papal choir; it has also been voluntarily submitted to from religious motives (see Eunuch). The operation has, however, been resorted to for other purposes. Thus in Africa it is said to have been used as a means of annihilating conquered tribes. The Hottentots and Bushmen, too, have the curious custom of removing one testicle when a boy is eight or nine years old, in the belief that this partial emasculation renders the victim fleeter of foot for the chase. The most dreadful of these mutilations is that practised by certain Australian tribes on their boys. It consists of cutting open and leaving exposed the whole length of the urethral canal and thus rendering sexual intercourse impossible. According to some authorities it is hatred of the white man and dread of slavery which are the reasons of this racial suicide. Among the Dyaks and in many of the Melanesian islands curious modes of ornamentation of the organs (such as the kalang) prevail, which are in the nature of mutilations.
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Penal Use - Mutilation as a method of punishment was common in the criminal law of many ancient nations. In the earliest laws of England mutilation, maiming and dismemberment had a prominent place. "Men branded on the forehead, without hands, feet, or tongues, lived as examples of the danger which attended the commission of petty crimes and as a warning to all churls" (Pike's History of Crime in England, 1873). The Danes were more severe than the Saxons. Under their rules eyes were plucked out; noses, ears and upper lips cut off; scalps town away; and sometimes the whole body flayed alive. The earliest forest-laws of which there is record are those of Canute (io16). Under these, if a freedman offered violence to a keeper of the king's deer he was liable to lose freedom and property; if a serf, he lost his right hand, and on a second offence was to die. One who killed a deer was either to have his eyes put out or lose his life. Under the first two Norman kings mutilation was the punishment for poaching.
It was, however, not reserved for that, as during the reign of Henry I. some coiners were taken to Winchester, where their right hands were lopped off and they were castrated. Under the kings of the West Saxon dynasty the loss of hands had been a common penalty for coining (The Obsolete Punishments of Shropshire, by S. Meeson Morris). Morris quotes a case in John's reign at the Salop Assizes in 1203, where one Alice Crithecreche and others were accused of murdering an old woman at Lilleshall. Convicted of being accessory, Crithecreche was sentenced to death, but the penalty was altered to that of having her eyes plucked out. During the Tudor and Stuart periods mutilations were a common form of punishment extra-judicially inflicted by order of the privy council and the Star Chamber. There are said to be preserved at Playford Hall, Ipswich, instruments of Henry VIII.'s time for cutting off ears. This penalty appears to have been inflicted for not attending church. By an act of Henry VIII. (33 Hen. VIII. c. 12) the punishment for "striking in the king's court or house" was the loss of the right hand. For writing a tract on The Monstrous Regimen of Women a Nonconformist divine (Dr W. Stubbs) had his right hand lopped off. Among many eases of severe mutilations during Stuart times may be mentioned those of Prynne, Burton, Bastwick and Titus Oates.
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