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vulvar inflammation, should not automatically be accepted as a sign
of molestation. Cautioning against hasty conclusions, Fournier in–
dicates a number of other medical causes of the symptom. He
presents the case of a young female patient with acute vaginitis in
which the injury was inflicted not in a neighbor's attack, as the pa–
tient originally charged, but through a parental beating. Because the
accused in the case was a man and the parent concerned was the
child's mother, and because the doctor was a male and the patient
was not, Masson charges a cover-up. But Fournier's argument is
medically sound, and, what's more, he plainly acknowledges the
widespread occurrence of such assaults on children . "Cases of rape
and sexual abuse," he writes, "(are) hardly rare in certain hospitals,"
and he advises full criminal prosecution for these heinous crimes.
Far from providing the devastating indictments he imagines, many
of Masson's cases prove nothing at all.
But let us for a moment grant Masson the benefit of the doubt
and proceed to the most damaging cases in the collection. In 1882,
Dr. Demetrius Zambaco published a case in the French periodical
L'Encephale
concerning masturbation in two young girls. Zambaco
relates at length the histories of "X" and "Y," two sisters ages six and
ten who, in public and private, masturbated twelve to fifteen times a
day. Despite bleeding and internal injury, the children used every
imaginable object-pencils, paintbrushes, pieces of wood, even
scissors, hairpins, and dinner forks-to stimulate themselves. There
was a strong element of rebellion in their behavior, and the more
harshly "X" and "Y" were reprimanded by their parents and doctors,
the more furiously they went at themselves. Confronted by this com–
pulsive behavior, Zambaco responded with a series of escalating
physical restraints . Verbal proscriptions gave way to cold showers
and chastity belts, then to whippings and straitjackets . Eventually,
"X" and
"Y"
were subjected to such "treatments" as electric applica–
tions to the genitalia and multiple cauterizations of the clitoris. Zam–
baco appears to have had almost no sense of the deep emotional
pathology of the case. His approach was purely punitive, and he
describes these tortures with a chilling nonchalance. ("I burned her
three times on both labia majora, and once on the clitoris, and to
punish her for her disobedience I cauterized her buttocks and loins
with the dreaded large iron.") Nor, Masson shows, was Zambaco
alone in his use of such draconian pseudo-therapies, Dr. Alfred
Hegar of Berlin argued in print for recourse to the ovariotomy as a
routine treatment for recurrent stomach discomfort. And, in the
