Set in eighteenth-century Italy, Cry to Heaven focuses on two characters: peasant-born Guido Maffeo, who is castrated at the age of six to preserve his soprano voice, and fifteen-year-old Tonio Treschi, the last son of a noble family from the Republic of Venice, whose father, Andrea, is a member of the Serenissima's Council of Three.
Feeder cattle are steers (castrated males) or heifers (females) mature enough to be placed in a feedlot where they will be fattened prior to slaughter.
The historian Fawn Brodie speculated that one of John Johnson's sons, Eli, meant to punish Joseph by having him castrated for an intimacy with his sister, Nancy Marinda Johnson, but author Bushman states that hypothesis failed.
According to Suetonius, Nero had one boy named Sporus castrated, and then had sex with him as though he were a woman.
The Connecticut town had taken its name, in turn, from Wethersfield, a village in the English county of Essex, the name of which derived from "wether", or in Old English wither, meaning a castrated lamb.