Circumcision Series - World's Most Controversial Surgery

Circumcision by David Gollaher, 2000, Edited Excerpts

Medical circumcision in its early phase was reserved for the carriage trade: better-off patients who could afford it. Consequently, medical men grew accustomed to thinking of the procedure in class terms. Advising his readers that the earliest known circumcisions were the prerogative of the priest caste of ancient Egypt, Peter Romondino drew an analogy between ancient and modern practice. Though few people realized it, he said, America was home to a group of spiritual descendents of the Egyptian priests, “a class which also observe circumcision as a hygienic precaution, where, from my personal observation, I have found that circumcision it thoroughly practiced by every male member of the class – this being the physician class.”

Students in leading medical schools such as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore were taught that the prepuce was tantamount to a minor birth defect and was source of future problems, which they as physicians should quickly correct soon after a boy was born. So it came about that the foreskin, viewed as dangerous by the medical profession, commonly came to indicate ignorance, neglect, and poverty.

Circumcision became standard practice, its legitimacy bolstered by the American military experience [WWII]. Physicians in the armed forces strongly believed that the foreskin was a risk factor for venereal diseases – a source of paranoia during the war – and encouraged uncircumcised recruits to undergo the operation. Impressed by the fact that most officers and soldiers from affluent families were circumcised, thousands of enlisted soldiers and sailors signed up for circumcision in military hospitals before returning to civilian life.

American doctors were so accustomed to thinking of the foreskin as worthless and of those who retained it as dirty that mainstream journals entertained no real criticism of circumcision until the 1960s. Learning of its advantages in the privacy of their physicians’ office, Americans found circumcision appealing not merely on medical grounds, but also for its connotations of science, health, and cleanliness – newly important class distinctions.

With each passing year, maternity care and childbirth for the middle and upper classes was changing from a domestic event managed by midwives, relatives, and friends into a medical event managed by physicians. Since midwives rarely performed circumcisions, for Gentiles having one’s foreskin removed became a sign of having been delivered by a physician. Doctors suggested it to parents immediately after the birth of a son. Circumcision, they professed, was based on state-of-the-art medical knowledge. And so circumcision became a token of the medicalization of childbirth, literally a symbol or the rising authority of the medical profession over the laity.

As white middle-class Gentiles adopted circumcision, those left behind were recent immigrants, people of color, the poor, and others at the margins of respectable society. These were the groups imagined to have filthy, malodorous bodies: people who lacked culture, manners, intelligence, and, in a word, civilization.