Writing Sample from Circumcision book: How an Ancient Ritual Became a Questionable Surgery–-A Complete Analysis

The History of Medical Circumcision

Medical circ (circ is my abbreviation for circumcision) is the cutting of the foreskin purely for health reasons. As we have seen, circ disappeared from Christianity early on. Yet the largely Christian United States is the only country where most boys are medically circumcised, and that’s due to a twisted historical process.

The path to circumcision began at the dawn of the Victorian era, with an obsession with the purported evils of masturbation, euphemistically called self-pollution. The 1716 pamphlet Onania: Or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and All its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes, Considered with Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those who have Already Injured Themselves by This Abominable Practice, exemplified this attitude. Later, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, promoted the idea that masturbation was the cause of many illnesses.

In 1885, Dr. Claude Francois Lallemand stated that boys masturbated because of irritation from “secretions” beneath the foreskin, which were likely just normal smegma. His view is symptomatic of a larger problem with Western medicine, with its preoccupation with disease, while ignoring well-being and physical pleasure. That’s why Lallemand assumed a boy masturbated due to a medical condition—it couldn’t just be because it felt good! He even invented a bogus medical condition called “spermatorrhea” (excessive ejaculations), which supposedly devastated the body, thus transmogrifying natural sexuality into a reprehensible and dangerous endeavor. But he had a solution: circ.

Lallemand established medical principles that are still accepted today:

  1. It is legitimate, and even necessary, to alter boys’ genitals.
  2. The boy’s parents are the client, not the boy himself.

Lallemand was French, but American business know-how took his ideas to the next level. Two of the greatest marketers in US history, Sylvester Graham, inventor of Graham crackers, and John Harvey Kellogg of cereal fame, popularized the notion their bland, starchy foods could curb sexual desire and discourage masturbation. According to Professor Howard Markel, Kellogg only promoted his cereals to improve digestion, but it seems to me that Kellogg indicated that they also helped prevent masturbation.

Graham’s imagination ran wild, “A masturbator becomes a confirmed degraded idiot, whose deeply sunken vacant glassy eyes, livid shriveled countenance, ulcerous toothless gums, fetid breath, feeble broken voice, emaciated dwarfish crooked body, bald—covered perhaps with suppurating blisters and running sores—denoting premature aging—a blighted body and ruined soul.”

It’s possible that Graham was actually describing the symptoms of poisoning from lead or arsenic, found in some commonly used materials of that time, such as wallpaper and paint.

Kellogg was the author of the 1888 bestseller Treatment for Self-Abuse [masturbation] and its Effects. Among the sadistic masturbation remedies he proposed was piercing the foreskin with wires to prevent erection and using carbolic acid to burn the clitoris. “Covering the organs with a cage has been practiced with entire success. Tying the hands is successful in some cases but will not always succeed.” He also wrote, “Circ should be performed without anesthesia, so pain is associated with the habit we wish to eliminate.” (And if none of the above worked, Kellogg was a fan of eugenics.)

Kellogg finally decided that there were only two effective remedies for masturbation: Kellogg’s cereals and circ. Kellogg was not consistent in his pronouncements and at one point said he was against routine circ (though ostensibly it could still be used to “cure” masturbation.) Dr. Barbara Chubak believes that it was instead Dr. Lewis Sayre who promoted routine circ, around 1870.

A few years later, British surgeon Sir Jonathan Hutchinson published the influential article “On Circumcision as a Preventative of Masturbation.” Circumcision, he assured us, would prevent Satan from stealing a boy’s soul via masturbation.

These campaigns were so successful, that by 1910 the Encyclopedia Britannica described circumcision as a “surgical operation which is commonly prescribed for purely medical reasons,” whereas before it had described it as a religious ritual. Later, the US Marines deemed circ so vital that you couldn’t enlist without it, and in the 1930s, the US Boy Scout Manual cited the widely held belief that masturbation would make a boy weaker. The manual was only corrected in the late 1960s. Even today, a common insult in the UK is calling a man a “wanker,” (contemptible, literally a masturbator) a last remnant of Victorian thinking.

In the 1800s, the incentive for an American doctor to circumcise was great—he took the moral high ground and profited financially at the same time. So, many jumped on the self-abuse bandwagon and invented a myriad of rationalizations to justify circ, a trend that persists even today. Here is a list of problems that doctors falsely claimed would be ameliorated by circ:

1845: “masturbation” — Edward Dixon

1855: “syphilis” — Jonathan Hutchinson

1865: “epilepsy” — Nathaniel Heckford

1870: “spinal paralysis” — Lewis Sayre (president of the American Medical Association!)

1873: “bedwetting” — Joseph Bell

1875: “scoliosis, paralysis of the bladder, clubfoot” — Joseph Bell

1879: “nocturnal emissions and abdominal neuralgia” — H. Kane

1881: “all eye problems” — Maximillian Landesberg

1888: “masturbation, thus curing 31 different ailments” — John Harvey Kellogg

1890: “blindness, deafness, and dumbness” — William Gentry

1894: “Prevents African-Americans [he used a different word] from raping white women.” “Cures nearly 100 different conditions.” — Peter Remondino.

1900: “sensuality, syphilis and other disorders” — E. Harding Freeland

1902: “priapism [persistent and painful erection of the penis], masturbation, and most functional nervous diseases of childhood” — L. Emmett Holt

1914: “tuberculosis” — Abraham Wolbarst

1949: “prostate cancer, venereal disease, and cancer of the tongue” — Eugene Hand

1985: “urinary tract infections” — T. E. Wiswell

2007: “HIV infection” — R. C. Baily et al.