A Founding Father’s Painful Self Cure for a Painful Condition
Gouverneur Morris (1752 – 1816) became known as the “Penman of the Constitution” after he wrote its Preamble. A passionate opponent of slavery, he particularly loathed the constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause, which boosted slave state representation. As he put it: “The inhabitant of Georgia and S.C. who goes to the coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice“. Morris was also a randy goat, who couldn’t keep it in his pants. That led to his painfully funny demise.
Morris had numerous lovers. He lost a leg when he fled from a cuckolded husband, either because he jumped straight off the wife’s bed and out a second floor window, or because he was struck by a carriage in his flight. A lost leg did not slow down Morris’ fornication, which prompted John Jay to say: “I almost wish he had lost something else“. Fast forward three decades, and Morris’ affairs had left him with a severe urethral obstruction: his urethra was clogged up. Desperate to clear the clog, he hit upon a nutty treatment. He broke off a bit of whalebone baleen from his wife’s corset, stuck it up his manhood, and twirled it around. The baleen barbs shredded his p-e-n-i-s from the inside, and he died from the resultant infection.
