To Snip Or Not To Snip: That Is The Question

The circumcision decision

Image by Adam Brożyński from Pixabay

Another excerpt from my upcoming book, Cloudy with a Risk of Children. The book is coming along; but the process is a bit like sausage-making: corralling bits and pieces of imagined prose into something readable is a messy process — and there’s no guarantee that the finished product will be edible.

Nonetheless, here’s a sampler to chew on (full piece available to paid subscribers).

To Snip or not to Snip: That is the Question

“A remedy [for masturbation] which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision… The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases.

The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.”

—John Harvey Kellogg

When I was a kid chowing down on John Harvey Kellogg’s eponymous Corn Flakes, I had no idea that the inventor of my breakfast cereal was also a physician.

But indeed he was, and an influential one at that, even though (perhaps because) many of his views were wacko; for instance, he was into yogurt enemas as a conduit to good health.

From the vantage point of today, of course, much of medicine’s history is bizarro-land: milk transfusions, bloodletting, leeches, snake oil cures, drinking urine, morphine for teething pain (Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup!), cigarettes as a cure for asthma, frontal lobotomies, and so on and on. 

Dr. Kellogg wasn’t the only medical doctor of his day to tout the benefits of circumcision in curbing masturbation. English physician Dr. Jonathan Hutchinson, probably the first doctor to extol the medical benefits of the procedure — he published a study in 1855 showing rates of venereal disease to be lower amongst the circumcised males of London — took to the pages of the British Medical Journal in 1890 in an article titled A Plea for Circumcision:

“[The foreskin] constitutes a harbour for filth, and is a constant source of irritation. It conduces to masturbation, and adds to the difficulties of sexual continence.

In defence of Drs. Kellogg and Hutchinson, masturbation was considered a great evil in that Victorian era, a grave sin with profoundly destructive effects on the body and mind, including — but not limited to — impotence, blindness, insanity, and even death.  

But even outside of Victorian times, the poor foreskin has had a rough ride, historically blamed not just for masturbation but for a long list of intractable ailments: insomnia, indigestion, rheumatism, epilepsy, bedwetting, bladder infections, hernias, kidney stones, skin cancer, erectile dysfunction. No wonder it’s been on the chopping block so often.