Betances also wrote several medical articles while in France. One of the articles examines elephantiasis; another deals with surgical castration, called "oscheotomy" at the time. Both books were also based on personal experience: there is evidence about a surgery he performed in Mayagüez on a Spanish government official with an elephantiasis lesion of the scrotum the size of a grapefruit for which the costs were paid for by the local government; another patient he operated upon had a lesion that weighed He also wrote an article on urethral obstructions in male patients (see above).