A much more weighty reason however why the patient attacked by some affection of the genitals turned not to men (Physicians) for help, but to the Gods, and the Priests who represented them, was the feeling of _shame_. Since first Adam and Eve had recourse to the fig-leaf, it has ever been a habit among all peoples of the ancient as of the modern world to withdraw the procreative parts from the view of others by covering them. But above all did the Ancients regard the exposure of these parts[272] one of the severest trials to which modesty could be exposed; and rightly enough therefore designate them by the name of _pudenda_, αἰδοῖα, _the parts of shame_. Neither the wide extension of Phallic worship, nor yet the compulsory exposure of the Ephebi[273] and the naked exercises of maidens and youths at Sparta[274], can fairly be cited in this connexion as proofs to the contrary. In our own day the most accomplished voluptuaries are in no wise shocked at undertaking in secret the most shameful doings, but yet when it comes to showing the Physician the diseased instruments of their bestial lusts, often put this off so long as to run great risks of entirely losing the signs of their manhood; and without a doubt it was the same at the period when habitual depravity had reached its culminating point of enormity. Even Priapus himself asks (Carm. 3): Nec mihi sit crimen, quod mentula semper operta est. (Nor let it be laid as a crime against me, that my member is ever covered up.) If with this is compared the poem from the Priapeia quoted on p. 74 of Vol. I., no one can fail to agree with us when we say that the field of observation open to Physicians in Antiquity with regard to diseases of the genitals can never have been at all extended. Even the Priests, at any rate in later times, were only resorted to in the more serious instances; but even so their journals of cases, supposing them ever to have kept such, would have been a far better source of information than those of the Physicians. We find a confirmation of this in the Mosaic Books of the Law, which contain the earliest and clearest delineations we possess of affections of the genital organs both in men and women.