[I]n the course of the eighteenth century this kind of frankness [about castration] became less acceptable…. More castrations were explained as having been necessitated at an early age by illness or an unspecified ‘need.’ A favourite cause… was the bite of a wild swan or a wild pig…. By the mid nineteenth century the surviving castrati of the Sistine Chapel had apparently all fallen victim to pigs.

-J. Rosselli