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Haven't got the balls to be a singer
Haven't got the balls to be a singer
Castrato - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA castrato (Italian, plural: castrati) is a man with a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto voice produced either by castration of the singer before puberty or one who, because of an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.
The preferred method of castration when castrati were popular was for the young boy to sit in a bath of hot water, infused with herbs, where the person administering the procedure would massage the boy's testicles with some force, eventually crushing them and causing them to dissolve away.
The method just described is a very good description of the way in which young boys became "thlibiae" in classical antiquity (Thlibo (Gk) = push out or squeeze out).
The recent exhibition in London "Handel's Castrati" indicates that by the 1700's, things were rather different. There were, on display, some instruments which, from their shape, were used to reach inside the incision in the boy's scrotum to hook out a loop of spermatic cord. What happened then can be read from a contemporary manual on surgery: "See that the largest needle is used, when tying-off the spermatic vessels, in castration". Some suggest that the severed testicles were left inside the boy's scrotum. This seems unlikely.
Anasthetics were unknown. The boy might be doped with wine or some opiate or again he might not. Very little information was left by castrati about their operations. There is a tradition concerning one of the most famous, Farinelli (b.Carlo Maria Broschi). It is said that when the barber-surgeon began to castrate him, the boy's shrieks could be heard all over the village.
Oouch...
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