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Some women have endless trouble with their womb: for decades they endure the discomfort of painful periods, and then, just as hormonal retirement beckons, on come the hot flushes, to say nothing of other afflictions. Women sometimes feel that life has been unfair to them in this respect; that isn’t so. Men have their own cross to bear, namely the prostate, a gland that only receives proper attention when it starts playing up. Then the prostrate becomes a bane, not only keeping a man awake at night, but also inconveniencing him in everyday activities like
going to meetings. Urinating becomes a depressing business. Men’s troubles! The prostate is thoroughly out of favour nowadays. Many women have children with the aid of test tubes, pipettes and incubators, and no longer have any need for it. . .
So is the prostate perhaps not that important after all? For example, there has never yet been a prostate transplant. There is no country on earth where the prostate is eaten, in contrast to testes (for example, in Spain) and penis (as blood sausage in Yemen). Odd, when one knows that in operations to resection the prostate via the urethra urologists fish out what look like strips of kebab.
Historically, the prostate came into its own at a quite late stage. Prostate problems were unknown in Ancient Egypt, undoubtedly partly because people did not live as long as they do now. Similarly, Hippocrates (c.460-c. 370 bc) writes nothing about the subject. The term was first used by Herophilus, who several centuries before Christ founded the famous school of Alexandria. Even Rudolf Virchow, the founder of modern pathology, collected only a few prostates in formalin.