Hmm. It seems possible that eunuchs could display certain “enfeebled” traits despite living longer. Some of the traits Vornoff described are mentioned by Hamilton and Mestler and the authors of the study on Ottoman and Asian eunuchs. One paper—I don’t remember which, but I can try to find it again if you’re interested—suggested that castrated animals lived longer because of general inantion. I am still curious about the extent to which castration at age 6 or 7 would have different effects on health and lifespan than castration around age 11, though I weakly suspect that 11 is the optimal age to do it at for life expectancy maximization purposes.
It seems possible that eunuchs could display certain “enfeebled” traits despite living longer.
Sure. In fact, they pretty much have to for the original story to make sense: the description of being pudgier, weaker, and more woman-like is common to all descriptions of eunuchs, East or West, including the long-lived ones. No one describes the Korean eunuchs (and future centenarians) as sporting enormous thick beards and holding strongman contests. So if you believe the long-life claims, then you must also believe that the enfeeblement can go along with longer-life.
I quoted those bits mostly to establish that yes, they definitely were physically eunuchs and they weren’t simply fakes who bought ‘eunuch status’ (as I’ve read a lot of the Chinese court eunuchs were doing towards the end as the system broke down), that they otherwise looked exactly like the long-lived eunuchs elsewhere, and it’s not as simple as they were castrated post-puberty because they were before—but Voronoff is emphatic about them not having any apparent longevity benefit to the point where he based his entire anti-aging paradigm on the belief that they have negative longevity.
Why this is, I don’t know. The most obvious differentiator between Egypt and the other countries, infectious disease burden, would predict the opposite of what Voronoff claims. So it would seem to be important to find out whether Voronoff was right about the Egyptian eunuchs and if he is, what could possibly be making such an enormous difference in outcomes, since this factor could potentially negate any gains in the modern environment as well and give clues as to what the mechanism is (evidence against the immune hypothesis, evidence for… what?).
I also don’t think I’ve seen Egyptian eunuchs ever come up before in the previous papers or discussions I read about castration and life expectancy, so further research on this could be useful. (Unfortunately, Egypt is in a lot of turmoil now and you’d probably need to read Egyptian Arabic or French if you wanted to do original research on the ground; it’s too much to hope for that there might be big registries of Egyptian eunuchs in English with data on lifespans.)
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.
Hmm. It seems possible that eunuchs could display certain “enfeebled” traits despite living longer. Some of the traits Vornoff described are mentioned by Hamilton and Mestler and the authors of the study on Ottoman and Asian eunuchs. One paper—I don’t remember which, but I can try to find it again if you’re interested—suggested that castrated animals lived longer because of general inantion. I am still curious about the extent to which castration at age 6 or 7 would have different effects on health and lifespan than castration around age 11, though I weakly suspect that 11 is the optimal age to do it at for life expectancy maximization purposes.
Sure. In fact, they pretty much have to for the original story to make sense: the description of being pudgier, weaker, and more woman-like is common to all descriptions of eunuchs, East or West, including the long-lived ones. No one describes the Korean eunuchs (and future centenarians) as sporting enormous thick beards and holding strongman contests. So if you believe the long-life claims, then you must also believe that the enfeeblement can go along with longer-life.
I quoted those bits mostly to establish that yes, they definitely were physically eunuchs and they weren’t simply fakes who bought ‘eunuch status’ (as I’ve read a lot of the Chinese court eunuchs were doing towards the end as the system broke down), that they otherwise looked exactly like the long-lived eunuchs elsewhere, and it’s not as simple as they were castrated post-puberty because they were before—but Voronoff is emphatic about them not having any apparent longevity benefit to the point where he based his entire anti-aging paradigm on the belief that they have negative longevity.
Why this is, I don’t know. The most obvious differentiator between Egypt and the other countries, infectious disease burden, would predict the opposite of what Voronoff claims. So it would seem to be important to find out whether Voronoff was right about the Egyptian eunuchs and if he is, what could possibly be making such an enormous difference in outcomes, since this factor could potentially negate any gains in the modern environment as well and give clues as to what the mechanism is (evidence against the immune hypothesis, evidence for… what?).
I also don’t think I’ve seen Egyptian eunuchs ever come up before in the previous papers or discussions I read about castration and life expectancy, so further research on this could be useful. (Unfortunately, Egypt is in a lot of turmoil now and you’d probably need to read Egyptian Arabic or French if you wanted to do original research on the ground; it’s too much to hope for that there might be big registries of Egyptian eunuchs in English with data on lifespans.)
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.