Understanding Emasculation: Western Medical Perspectives on Chinese Eunuchs

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, western physicians and medical observers became fascinated by the Chinese practice of emasculating young boys and men to serve as palace eunuchs. As a result of interaction and encounters between western physicians and Chinese eunuch patients at western hospitals and dispensaries in Peking, emasculation became a serious subject of medical inquiry that also shed light on Chinese-western mutual perceptions. The writings of these western physicians are the only known historical accounts of the emasculation procedure from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) extant today. More than just voyeuristic commentaries on another Orientalist stereotype of 'exotic' China, these accounts presented readers with what their authors perceived to be textual evidence of the efficacy and/or superiority of western medicine and even offered insight and medical data of importance for topics being debated in the West, such as the use of castration to resolve sexual and psychological deviancy.

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