In an article published in the British Medical Journal in 1979, Dr F. Kräupl Taylor reviewed the literature on penis captivus and concluded that while "almost all the cases mentioned in medical publications and in textbooks are based on hearsay and rumour", two papers published by nineteenth-century German gynaecologists – Scanzoni (1870) and Hildebrandt (1872) – who had personally dealt with cases of the condition "leave no doubt about the reality of this unusual symptom", which, however, "is so rare that it is often regarded nowadays as no more than a prurient myth".
She and her husband had to abstain from sexual intercourse because her intense vaginal contractions were "most painful to him and ... did on several occasions end in a spasm ... which sometimes lasted more than ten minutes and made it impossible for the couple to separate".
"[1] In a letter published in the British Medical Journal in 1980 in response to Kräupl Taylor's article, Dr Brendan Musgrave recalled that in 1947 when he was a houseman at the Royal Isle of Wight County Hospital he had seen a case of this seemingly rare condition.
"I can distinctly remember the ambulance drawing up and two young people, a honeymoon couple I believe, being carried on a single stretcher into the casualty department.
'"[2] In her memoir An Impossible Woman (1975), Graham Greene's friend dottoressa Elisabeth Moor recounts how she was once urgently called to the Hotel Eden-Paradiso in Anacapri, Italy.
She mentions – though only as hearsay – "a much worse case" involving a Swiss girl that occurred in Lucerne, Switzerland, during the war and resulted in "dreadful injuries" when the man panicked: "they had got stuck inside each other.
"[3] A report of the phenomenon in an 1884 article by one Egerton Yorrick Davis in the Philadelphia Medical News was later discovered to be a hoax perpetrated by Sir William Osler.