Recently New Scientist posted a gallery of a “dozen bizarre devices from medicine’s dark past.” These odd gizmos are among several thousand items put online by the London Science Museum in an exhibit called Brought to Life. There are indeed some weird items in there — a dissected stomach splayed out like a fan, wax legs showing syphilitic ulcers, that sort of thing. Of course, there are sexual contraptions too. Check out the 19th century male anti-masturbation device and, even better, the jugum penis.

Jugum penis? What the hell is that, you ask? New Scientist explains: “this device was intended as a treatment for ‘nocturnal incontinence’ and to prevent masturbation. It was designed to deter nighttime emissions by causing enough pain to waken the sleeper if an erection threatened.” Jugum penis, according to an 1866 medical lexicon, literally means “yoke of the penis” — presse-urèthre in French. There are a number of fascinating search results for “jugum penis” among the hundred-year-old books now available from Google Books. For example, there is the case history of a thirteen-year-old boy who apparently was wetting his bed from the age of four onward. In this case, the attending physician did not employ the jugum penis “because it strangulated the glans [of the penis] so much that it could not be endured for the necessary length of time.” Instead he whipped up his own contraption:

I selected a bougie of a size large enough to fill his urethra, from which I cut about two and a half, or three inches. Having placed that on the outside of the under part of the penis on a line parallel to the canal, with its point projecting a short way beyond the glans to avoid as much as possible any pain from pressure, I passed straps of adhesive plaster around, (first at the point of the penis, and afterwards continuing strap after strap the length of the piece of bougie,) and pulled them so tight as to press the bougie close in upon the urethra, so that no space was left by which urine could pass. This was done at ten o’clock at night, and at three o’clock he called me out of bed, having a great desire to pass urine. I removed the straps, &c. and when he had emptied his bladder, I applied others in the same manner. The next desire for this evacuation was about seven o’clock, and the next again at eleven o’clock in the forenoon. After each evacuation the pressure was renewed without any unpleasant symptom, and in three days he was cured of incontinence of urine. How far such treatment might answer the purpose of cleanliness and convenience, in paralysis, I have as yet had no experience, but when a case of that kind comes under my care, I shall not hesitate in giving it a trial.

The image of this adult man getting up in the middle of the night to release an adolescent boy’s penis from some bondage contraption is mind-boggling. It certainly makes you grateful for modern medicine — and it also makes you realize that what was the nightmare of yesterday’s adolescents is the wet dream of today’s perverts. Nowadays a jugum penis would be a desirable part of many a subculture dedicated to chastity devices and genital bondage. Doubtless there are folks who would actually consider buying this decorative print of a jugum penis.

And lest you ladies feel like premodern industry had nothing to offer you but bustles, have a look at this eighteenth century glass female urinal — “designed to resemble an erect penis with testicles.” What was the assumption behind the creation of that gadget?

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