A rare offprint - we’ve found no recorded copies in OCLC or Copac.
John Freeman Knott (1853 - 1921) “gained an international reputation as an exceptional science writer who published over 2,000 essays on sensational subjects including spontaneous human combustion, female circumcision, kissing, phrenology, and the pathologies of Napoleon and Lord Byron.” (The Oxford History of the Irish Book Vol IV. p543-544).
The contents of the present article, described by the author as a “weird and scarcely explicable series of tamperings with the female body” essentially amounts to a kind of check list of racist observational gynaecology in Victorian travel narratives. Citing John MacGillivray, Francois le Valliant, William Speirs Bruce, Mungo Park, Emile Duhousset, Joseph Gallieni and of course Richard Burton, it is a veritable roll call of nineteenth-century explorers, and their descriptions of what they considered to be female genital abnormalities.
The author dips briefly into antiquity via Strabo to posit a speculative link between “hypertrophy of the clitoris” and “the so-called ‘Lesbian Love,’ whose ardour - carried to the highest degree of inspired frenzy - dictated the immortal effusions of the divine Sappho.”
A three and a half page extract from Joseph Gallieni is reproduced in French and constitutes his observations from the Niger region on female genital mutilation - what Knott calls “female circumcision and clitoridectomy”. This is followed by Richard Burton’s account of “infibulation”, as reported in the notes of his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.
We have traced no other copy of this offprint. Yale lists a later offprint of the same title but of different pagination (26pp), “Reprinted from the New York Medical Journal for September 7, 1907.”
