A 46-year-old man from Jilong city in Taiwan cut off his penis and testicles with a pair of scissors. Afterward, he flushed his severed organ down the toilet.

According to Chinese newspaper Kwong Wah Yit Poh (as translated by The Toronto Star Online), the man was drunk and enraged following a quarrel with his girlfriend.

His girlfriend rushed the man, who was bleeding profusely, to a hospital. By their arrival, he had fallen into a coma. After regaining consciousness, he could not believe what he had done.

The man screamed while his girlfriend appeared to pray, Kwong Wah Yit Poh reports.

Three centimeters (a little more than an inch) of the man's penis remain, which allows him to urinate. Doctors said they would have been able to reattach the man's penis if he had not flushed it.

Most cases of castration are not self-inflicted. For instance, on July 11, 2011, Catherine Kieu laced her husband's food with sleeping pills, tied him to a bed, severed his penis, and put it in the garbage disposal. According to reports, Kieu was angry because her husband was dating a former girlfriend. The husband, whose penis could not be reattached, had surgery that allowed him to urinate again. Jurors found Kieu, 50, guilty of torture and aggravated mayhem for the July 11 attack.

The most entertaining of these stories is Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt's. On June 23, 1993, Lorena cut off more than half of her husband's penis while he slept. Then 24, she alleged he had returned home drunk and raped her. After leaving the house with the severed object, she threw it out of a car window into a field, where it was found and later reattached in what is arguably the most successful of reattachment surgeries.

Putting his notoriety to good use, John Wayne Bobbitt became a porn star.

Using microsurgical techniques, surgeons can successfully reconstruct structures allowing a patient essentially a full recovery. In some cases, such as that of John Wayne Bobbitt, patients have achieved near-normal appearance and function, including a good urine flow and absence of urethral stricture, with capabilities of erection and sensitivity.

Unfortunately, most castrated men never benefitted from such advanced surgical techniques as was the case for castrati, the famed singers of 17th and 18th Century Italy. With the aim of making a fortune, parents castrated their sons from the age of eight upwards to make them better singers. Music composers and lovers alike prized the castrato voice for its combination of high pitch and power. Supposedly, the castrati could reach the sweetest of notes while delivering a pure sound with all the strength of an adult male. Historians say about 4,000 boys were mutilated in this manner each year during the heyday of castrati.