The self-castrated hatmaker who killed John Wilkes Booth (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The self-castrated hatmaker who killed John Wilkes Booth (2015)

washingtonian.com

43 pointsrathertrue26 comments

> His rash tendencies exhibited themselves in strange ways. One day while he was ministering in the summer of 1858, Corbett was ogled by a pair of prostitutes, and the lower half of his body responded invitingly. He went home, took a pair of scissors, snipped an incision under his scrotum, and removed his testicles, then headed out to a prayer meeting.

> In the Bible, Matthew 19:12 quotes Christ as saying “there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Corbett made himself a eunuch and didn’t check himself into Massachusetts General Hospital until he’d finished his prayers, had a full dinner, and taken a light stroll through the city that evening.

whelp. Thats enough internet for me today...

Surely there's a reasonable middle ground...

Call me a pussy; but Im going for a cold shower or a swift punch in the nuts before i grab the scissors...

The guy certainly had ba... uh, courage. Jesus is known for saying striking things, like "If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire." (Matthew 18:8) He was the master of attention-grabbing metaphor. Of course here he means "deal seriously with your sin", not "get out the butcher's knife".

Another thing to consider when taking the Bible angle:

> He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.

Deuteronomy 23 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%202...

Hi! This is part of Jewish religious purity law and not usually taken as part of the rules that govern most Christian denominations. For example, women who are menstruating are usually not banned from participating in Christian services, and any other people would be unsuited to partake in Temple service according to Jewish religious law are usually allowed to participate in worship in Christianity.

Thus heightening Jesus’ mysterious irony, and probing the dichotomy between acceptance before humans and the abundant grace of spiritual redemption

The physical human body is said to parallel and prefigure the glorified heavenly body. Archbishop Fulton Sheen was quoted as saying that the only “man-made things” in Heaven are the Five Wounds of Christ.

>> Korean Statue Depicts A Jesus So Jacked It Looks Like His Last Supper Was Pure Protein (2018)

https://brobible.com/life/article/korean-jesus-statue-jacked...

Choosing Castration: A Thematic Analysis of the Perceived Pros and Cons of Genital Injuries and Ablation by Men Who Voluntarily Sought Castration

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10102058/

This is kind of funny: “Furthermore, for some, the frequency of playing with male action figures that lack genitals (e.g., Ken doll, GI Joe) during childhood may have contributed to their castration desire (Wong et al., 2021).”

> “Furthermore, for some, the frequency of playing with male action figures that lack genitals (e.g., Ken doll, GI Joe) during childhood may have contributed to their castration desire (Wong et al., 2021).”

I'm assuming Wong 2021 has nothing to say about this other than the assertion.

A basic prerequisite for this would be that ordinary people's genitals are visible through their pants.

> I'm assuming Wong 2021 has nothing to say about this other than the assertion

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01808-6

> We designed a survey to compare the psychological, sexual, and childhood experiences for subgroups of men with extreme interest in castration. The survey was posted on the Eunuch Archive, an online platform for individuals interested in the topic. Data from 822 individuals were included in the analyses.

I’m not curious enough to pay Springer’s exorbitant individual license fee, but I can see that Wong 2021 does cite other studies on the body image effects of action figures and dolls on preadolescent boys.

Have you never attended a Hair Metal concert in the 1980s, or at least seen “Spïnal Täp”?

IIRC, Ken Dolls had tan lines or “permanent” briefs, but could remove pants from many action figures and dolls (and put on skirts and dresses on the males, interchangeably)

If you don't want to assume, here is the section from Wong 2021:

>While we did not find any group difference in the experience of playing with toys without genitals in childhood, the frequency of playing with such toys is associated with erotic attraction to castration for the Interested and Wannabe groups. These findings suggest that childhood play with male toy figurines lacking genitalia might potentially contribute to BIID, which for some individuals may fulminate as extreme castration ideations and ultimately genital ablation. Such an impact from toy play resembles other study findings (Fernandez & Pritchard, 2012; Galioto & Crowther, 2013) that exposure to slender and muscular models may lower body satisfaction and motivate body modification for males, in parallel with the Barbie doll syndrome for girls (Dittmar et al., 2006). Yet it should also be noted that there was a higher proportion (59% vs. 45%) of individuals in the Castrated group, who never played with male figurines, than in the Wannabe group. These results indicate that play with male genital-less toys may be significant for some, but not all, in contributing to extreme castration ideations.

Ah, the old "there's no result overall, but if you examine the sub-subgroups, you can see one! No, ten!"

what the fuck man

what the fuck was that haha

The internet is not the problem, it’s the users, per usual.

> there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs

This appears to be a bad translation. Modern translation is "and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven". This is referring to celibacy. The issue is explained in more detail by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 verse 8-9.

I’ve gotten to study a lot about hat making recently, and a little known fact about is that the use of mercuric nitrate in the felting process poisoned many workers in the hat factories, creating a condition called erethism, also called "mad hatter disease."

The exposure resulted in slurred speech, tremors, stumbling, and, in extreme cases, hallucinations.

It’s pretty likely that Corbett was exposed to the same!

This was mentioned in the article:

> Having spent much of his life in the hat industry, Corbett could have been succumbing to mercury poisoning. The ill effects of the mercury vapors used in finishing, Corbett’s specialty, had become public by this time, even part of folklore after Lewis Carroll introduced the country to the Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865.

That's not 'little known'. That's the only thing almost anyone knows about hat-making.

Agreed. But that only makes me wonder: Out of the "a lot" that GP recently learned about hat-making, what are the next one or two most interesting factoids after that one?

Almost entirely unrelated, but the life story on Thomas Hines is fascinating, so I'll mention it anyway.

Hines led a raid into Indiana before Morgan's more famous incursion during the Civil War; I was in the area when I found out about Hines' exploits, and reading more about him (all hail Wikipedia) was quite the rabbit hole.

His career path: grammar teacher -> field officer for the CSA -> guerrilla warfare coordinator for the CSA operating out of Toronto -> newspaper editor -> Tennessee lawyer -> chief justice of the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

Shortly after Lincoln's assassination he was mistaken for John Wilkes Booth and fled Detroit for Canada (hijacking a ferry to do so), which inspired the rumor that Booth had fled to Canada.

There is an album and videocassette, possibly had “official bootleg” status, by the Swans titled “Public Castration Is A Good Idea”, and the typesetting as album cover “art” is not discreet about that. Swans are a New York “No Wave” band known for their loud Industrial Noise concerts with reports of bleeding eardrums

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Castration_Is_a_Good_Id...

Bonus Technical Fact: in 1986, audio Compact Discs (“Red Book”) were penetrating the consumer market, and Swans were releasing albums with TRT just over 74 minutes, in order to maximize the 650MB storage capacity. In fact some would squeeze in up to 80 minutes of audio and CD players needed really good triple-beam tracking, plus error correction, for those. https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/vU7spvGEpV5k8JUHMuFFD

For a really gritty depiction of at-home unlicensed castration surgery cum revenge fantasy, “Hard Candy” starring Elliot Page is out there.

In Robert J. Sawyer’s The Neanderthal Parallax sf novel series, there’s a male character [rapist] who describes firsthand how it felt to surgically lose just one testicle, and how he felt less aggressive, less angry all the time; his libido, formerly out of control, seemed nearly normal?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax

Sawyer thus promotes castration for White people as a forward-thinking eugenic punishment which can be visited on all genetic relatives of the offender! ... an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and 10 nuts for a single nut!

They don’t make people like this anymore, imagine being so sure of what is right and wrong. Now it’s all just cynicism and irony, such is the age I suppose

Lucky he didn’t die of infection in 1858

For which Booth was unlucky.

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