For decades, “untranslatable” disorders like these were studied as mere scientific curiosities, which existed in parts of the world where people apparently didn’t know any better. Koro is considered a culture-bound syndrome – a mental illness that only exists in certain societies. Is this what caused the Salem witch trials.It affected 57 people, including eight women, for whom it tends to manifest as a fear that their nipples are retreating into the body. Koro has a history stretching back thousands of years, but the most recent outbreak occurred in 2015, in eastern India. In South-east Asia and China, it’s common enough that it even has a name: “koro”, possibly – and rather graphically – after the Javanese word for tortoise, referring to how it looks when they retract their heads into their shells. It pops up fairly regularly in certain cultures across the globe. In the end, over 500 people sought treatment at public hospitals.Īs it happens, the fear of losing one’s penis is more mainstream than you might think. Though public health officials scrambled to contain the hysteria outbreak, explaining that it was caused by “psychological fear” alone, it didn’t work. Specifically, the locals were suspicious of meat from pigs that had been vaccinated in a programme the government had imposed on Singaporean farms. The word on the street was that the sudden penis withering was caused by something the men had eaten. Unscrupulous local doctors cashed in, recommending various injections and traditional remedies. Men desperately tried to hold onto their genitals, using whatever they had to hand – rubber bands, clothes pegs, string. Thousands of men had spontaneously become convinced that their penises were shrinking away – and that the loss would eventually kill them. In the preceding days, a peculiar phenomenon had swept across Singapore. “DO NOT FEAR KORO,” screamed the headline in the Straits Times newspaper on November 7, 1967.
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