In ancient days, castration was known as "the palace punishment" because shearing off the genitals of male slaves, captured enemies or other unlucky young men was thought to be the only way to make them safe for service in the harem. There were several variations on this odious operation.

Some castrati, or eunuchs, as they were called (in Greek, the word means "he who has charge of the bed"), were simply shaved of all their external sex organs, so that they had to urinate through a quill. Others were relieved of only their penises, leaving the testes intact; sometimes only the testes were removed. Whatever method was used, the risk of infection and death was high. In fact, in Reay Tannahill's Sex in History, a delightful romp through five millennia of sexual practices, she reports that "in the seventeenth century on the Upper Nile, the main source of supply for fully shaved eunuchs in the West, only one in four could be relied on to survive."

But although lost, the severed genitalia were not forgotten. Chinese eunuchs treasured their dismembered members like small children who've lost a tooth, secreting them carefully "in common pint measures hermetically closed, and placed on a high shelf. " Even in the late nineteenth century, Tannahill reports, in order to show that he was qualified for a palace promotion, the aspiring eunuch might have to present his "pickled precious" to the chief eunuch in order to demonstrate his fitness for the job. Sometimes they were even buried with the poor fellow in his coffin.