"A sign to which the old authors often attached much importance was furnished by the urinary stream. In the De Secretis Mulierum, wrongly attributed to Albertus Magnus,[1] it is laid down that 'the virgin urinates higher than the woman.' Riolan, in his Anthropographia, discussing the ability of virgins to ejaculate urine to a height, states that Scaliger had observed women who were virgins emit urine in a high jet against a wall, but that married women could seldom do this. Bonaciolus also stated that the urine of virgins is emitted in a small stream to a distance with an acute hissing sound. (Parthenologia, p. 281.)[2]……There is no doubt a tendency for the various stresses of sexual life to produce an influence in this direction, though they act far too slowly and uncertainly to be a reliable index to the presence or the absence of virginity.
"Another common ancient test of virginity by urination rests on a psychic basis, and appears in a variety of forms which are really all reducible to the same principle. Thus we are told in De Secretis Mulierum that to ascertain if a girl has been
- ↑ "Already in the thirteenth century, Albert Bollstœdt, Bishop of Ratisbonne, better known as Albertus Magnus, had, in spite of his clerical profession, furnished much scabrous matter concerning the opposite sex in his work De Secretis Mulierum."—Centuria Librorum Absconditorum: Pisanus Fraxi (Ashbee): London: Privately Printed, 1897. The compiler of this monumental work and the two companion volumes, Index Librorum Prohibitorum and Catena Librorum Tacendorum, would seem to be at variance with Havelock Ellis. A further reference to Albertus Magnus by Fraxi is worth giving: "Shall a bishop, raised to the See of Ratisbonne, (exclaims the erudite James Atkinson) and (still more monstrous) shall a canonised man, an 'in cœlum sublevatus,' undertake a natural history of the most natural secret, inter secretalia fœminea? Is the natural and divine law at once to be expounded, inter Scyllam et Charybdim, of defailance and human orgasm?"—Medical Bibliography, p. 72.
- ↑ We have already referred to Schurig's work.
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