In any case, thanks for mentioning the case of Egyptian eunuchs. It’s plausible that Lumifer’s suggestion, that social or cultural causes may be behind the shorter lifespans of Egyptian eunuchs, accounts for this effect, but I obviously can’t say either way, not having looked into the matter of Egyptian eunuchs myself.
It is worth mentioning that Hamilton and Mestler didn’t think that African American eunuchs gained as many years of life from castration as white eunuchs did. I basically ignored the data on African American eunuchs from Hamilton and Mestler in the above post. In fact, I don’t have much of an intuition regarding how race might affect the number of years of life gained from health/medical interventions at all.
It is worth mentioning that Hamilton and Mestler didn’t think that African American eunuchs gained as many years of life from castration as white eunuchs did. I basically ignored the data on African American eunuchs from Hamilton and Mestler in the above post.
Oh, I thought you covered all the eunuchs… If you left out poorer-performing eunuch groups, that tends to undermine the case. Unless one wanted to argue that Africans didn’t benefit and so through all the African admixture, Egyptian ones might not benefit either. That would be somewhat plausible. There are consistent differences in lifespan between races, after all.
One more thing is that evidently castration had a low survival rate. That makes long life conditional not only on having been castrated, but on on having been castrated and surviving it.
If there were such a mortality bias where the procedure kills the weaker, then unless native Egyptian surgical skills in the late 1800s are much better than Chinese surgical skills, I would again expect that to produce excess longevity in Egyptian eunuchs and not the Chinese/Korean eunuchs (which is the opposite of what we seem to observe).
That was a general point about eunuch longevity studies, not specifically about the Egyptian ones. I expect the techniques in Egypt and China to have beeen similar.
I expect that the survival rate should be incredibly close to 100%, if one goes to a surgeon rather than cutting himself. The number of years of life one should expect to lose from dying during an orchiectomy times the probability of death occurring then is going to be hundreds of times less then the expected number of years even a 30-year old would gain from castration.
The survival rate is close to 100% now. However the data that you rely on comes from previous centuries when the survival rate was low. Thus your data set has a literal survival bias.
In any case, thanks for mentioning the case of Egyptian eunuchs. It’s plausible that Lumifer’s suggestion, that social or cultural causes may be behind the shorter lifespans of Egyptian eunuchs, accounts for this effect, but I obviously can’t say either way, not having looked into the matter of Egyptian eunuchs myself.
It is worth mentioning that Hamilton and Mestler didn’t think that African American eunuchs gained as many years of life from castration as white eunuchs did. I basically ignored the data on African American eunuchs from Hamilton and Mestler in the above post. In fact, I don’t have much of an intuition regarding how race might affect the number of years of life gained from health/medical interventions at all.
Oh, I thought you covered all the eunuchs… If you left out poorer-performing eunuch groups, that tends to undermine the case. Unless one wanted to argue that Africans didn’t benefit and so through all the African admixture, Egyptian ones might not benefit either. That would be somewhat plausible. There are consistent differences in lifespan between races, after all.
One more thing is that evidently castration had a low survival rate. That makes long life conditional not only on having been castrated, but on on having been castrated and surviving it.
If there were such a mortality bias where the procedure kills the weaker, then unless native Egyptian surgical skills in the late 1800s are much better than Chinese surgical skills, I would again expect that to produce excess longevity in Egyptian eunuchs and not the Chinese/Korean eunuchs (which is the opposite of what we seem to observe).
That was a general point about eunuch longevity studies, not specifically about the Egyptian ones. I expect the techniques in Egypt and China to have beeen similar.
I expect that the survival rate should be incredibly close to 100%, if one goes to a surgeon rather than cutting himself. The number of years of life one should expect to lose from dying during an orchiectomy times the probability of death occurring then is going to be hundreds of times less then the expected number of years even a 30-year old would gain from castration.
The survival rate is close to 100% now. However the data that you rely on comes from previous centuries when the survival rate was low. Thus your data set has a literal survival bias.