Moreover, that part which hangeth over the end of the foreskin, is moved up and down in coition, that in this attrition it might gather more heat, and increase the pleasure of the other sexe; a contentation of which they are defrauded by this injurious invention. For, the shortnesse of the prepuce is reckoned among the organical defects of the yard, whether it be original or [induced ?] by an artificial procision of it. And although neither of these kinds of brevity doth incommode the action of the yard, which is extension and ejaculation of the seed; yet circumcision detracts somewhat from the delight of women, by lessening their titillation. Hence she in the epigram found herself aggrieved at this invention, thinking it had been more reasonable to have added than to have detracted from that organ.

The skin of the Yard is long and loose that it may swell or slack as the Yard doth, and the foreskin of that skin sometimes covers the head of the Yard, and sometimes goes so far back that it will not come forward again. This skin in time of the Venerious action keeps the mouth of the womb close that no old air can get in, yet some think the action might be better performed without it; the Jews were commanded to be Circumcised, but now Circumcision avails not and is forbidden by the Apostle. I hope no man will be so void of reason and Religion, as to be Circumcised to make trial which of these two opinions is the best; but the world was never without some mad men, who will do anything to be singular: were the foreskin any hindrance to procreation or pleasure, nature had never made it, who made all things for these very ends and purposes.

Doctor Bell fell down the well
and broke his collar bone;
Doctors should attend the sick
and leave the well alone.

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind[;] as that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat that fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Natural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each. No organ will be formed, as Paley has remarked, for the purpose of causing pain or for doing an injury to its possessor. If a fair balance be struck between the good and evil caused by each part, each will be found on the whole advantageous. After the lapse of time, under changing conditions of life, if any part comes to be injurious, it will be modified; or if it be not so, the being will become extinct, as myriads have become extinct.

Hardly any part of the body which can be unnaturally modified has escaped. ... The motives are various; ... certain mutilations are connected with religious rites, or they mark the age of puberty, or the rank of the man, or they serve to distinguish the tribes. Amongst savages the same fashions prevail for long periods, and thus mutilations, from whatever cause first made, soon come to be valued as distinctive marks.

- Karl Menninger

- Piet Hein
"Grooks", 1966

"Greed plays a role in causing unnecessary surgery, although I don't think the economic motive alone is enough to explain it. There's no doubt that if you eliminated all unnecessary surgery, most surgeons would go out of business. They'd have to look for honest work, because the surgeon gets paid when he performs surgery on you, not when you're treated some other way. In pre-paid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations."

- Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD. "Confessions of a Medical Heretic" (1979)
Chapter 3 ("Ritual Mutilations"), pp. 58-59.

- Thomas Szasz

The minute that a surgeon cuts the skin...harm is done. The benefit of a treatment will have to exceed that harm before the doctor is doing good. Unfortunately, many treatments have no benefit or only marginal benefit.

After the drama of birth and baptism, a child's ordeals are far from over. In many cultures the children must face the ritual genital mutilation we call circumcision. This extraordinary procedure which, were it not hallowed by ancient tradition, would be prosecuted as child abuse, occurs in several forms in different parts of the world, sometimes applied to young males and sometimes to young females. In all cases, parts of the external genitals are removed - the foreskin in males and the clitoris and/or labia in females. Male children are usually mutilated by older males and female children by older females.

Literally millions of cases of these genital assaults occur annually and a whole range of preposterous excuses and explanations have been given as to why this savaging of young humans is necessary. In earlier days most of the explanations had to do with religious dictates, sacred demands that could not be queried rationally. With the fading of religious beliefs in some countries in later years, new excuses had to be found and a set of spurious medical reasons were invented.

...No other species behaves in this bizarre way towards its young, but where religious customs take a hold on a culture it is usually difficult to shift them. No matter how cruel or pointless they may be, they become stubbornly resistant to common sense or objective medical opinion.

- Desmond Morris,
"The Human Sexes:
a Natural History
of Man and Woman"
pp 134-6

Modern medicine assuredly has all the trappings of a science, and it undeniably makes abundant use of discoveries in the biological sciences, but it remains perilously poised between science and 'healing art', based as much on superstition as logic. The training of medical students still does not predispose to scepticism or an open mind in the face of text-book authority. The stance that doctors take on controversial issues com­monly owes more to what they imbibed from their mentors than to a critical evaluation of the evidence.

The problems may be intrinsic to a profession forced to grapple eternally with the anfractuosities [windings and turnings] of human nature and the limited options for experimentation.

...

Nobody seems to have questioned the reality of ptosis ["dropped organs"] for some fifty years, but the medical profession took a grip on itself in the late 1920s, when doubts were at last voiced. Over the next two decades ptosis quietly slipped out of the text-books, but in some centres floating kidneys were still being surgically corrected in the years fol­lowing the Second World War. Ann Dally reports sightings of dropped organ diagnoses in 1992, however, so one cannot be sure that patients are not even now being subjected to this highly unpleasant ordeal. Tonsillectomy, to which untold numbers of children were subjected during the first half of the twentieth century, was fortunately in general without overt ill-effects, and so its efficacy was barely ques­tioned until the mid-1950s, when the practice gradually fell out of favour. The same was true of uterine 'dilatation and curetage'.

Surgeons were always easily persuaded of the benefits of removing dispensable body parts. George Bernard Shaw satirised the practice in The Doctor's Dilemma, in which the surgeon, Cutler Walpole - commonly thought to be based on Sir William Arbuthnot Lane... - finds an inessential organ, the nuciform sac; this he gives out to be the seat of every kind of disease and earns social and pecuniary success by relieving his grateful patients of it. In the years before Shaw wrote the play surgeons had for instance been taking out healthy ovaries from untold thousands of women as a cure-all for undiagnosed conditions. This operation at the time had a mortality rate of some 20 per cent.

Circumcised males do not benefit from their circumcision but instead only suffer pain and permanent disfigurement of their genitalia.

- Thomas Bartman, MD, PHD
Division of Neonatology University of California, San Francisco
Pediatrics, Evanston, Jan 2001, Vol. 107:1, p 210

America's habituation to routine circumcision is not less aberrant viewed from a cost/benefit standpoint than it is looked at from a sociologic perspective.

Considering all the time, pain, and paper-work involved in routine circumcision in this country, it's no wonder the rest of the civilized world of medical care looks at us and just shakes it head. And, unlike the money our obstetrician colleagues waste on routine fetal monitoring, we can't even blame it on the lawyers.

- James A. Canfield, MD, FAAP
Amherst Pediatrics
ibid

...universal male circumcision makes no more sense than the other favorite operation of the 1950s - the ubiquitous tonsillectomy. ...[it is] counterintuitive and highly unlikely to meet reasonable cost- effectiveness criteria.

- John M. Goldenring, MD, MPH,FAAP
ibid.

- Samoan author Albert Wendt

A cultural malignancy - such as a tradition of slavery or abuse of women - can sometimes be made to evaporate in [a short] time, thanks to a few practical adjustments. Not all cultural features are so delicate. A culturally enforced habit may long outlive its usefulness, persisting thanks to sanctions imposed by the members of the culture, who may be oblivious to, or only dimly appreciate the original rationale of their habit-turned-tradition.

- Daniel Dennett
Freedom Evolves
p 182

The penis is a beautiful part of any man, just as the yoni is a beautiful part of any woman. Let us leave them smooth, beautiful and intact, with all the protective, self-cleaning and pleasure-producing parts. It is not so much to do - it takes no effort to leave a penis or yoni alone, in all of its beauty, mystery and power.

... it is not circumcision that saves ...

Vet (after a silence): I'd have to report you to the ASPCA for cruelty.

The supporters of many forms of alternative medicine today claim it as a virtue that they are based on practices that have been in use for centuries, as if it was some sort of recommendation that they date back to medieval times or even earlier. A more accurate description might be that they are steeped in ancient superstition. It also seems somewhat perverse to treat medical practice as some kind of antique furniture whose value increases with age. Medicine in medieval times and the ancient world relied heavily on witchcraft, and even in modern times it has never managed to rid itself entirely of an element of magic and ritual.

The male prepuce has gone straight from being an inconsequential "flap of skin" to being a complex immunological organ, just in time to be infected by a virus that targets immune cells. Is this an indication of accelerated evolution, perhaps driven by medicine's century-long obsession with the purported pathologies of male genitals, or perhaps just a demonstration of medicine's capacity to deceive the public?

Originally Posted by Saturos
To all who voted No [to a poll asking "Are you circumcised?"] how hard is it to keep your penis clean?

Pull back, soap soap soap, water, done. As easy as cleaning you toes, just without the bending over.

If you want to saw off the end of your penis, you're welcome. (laughter) You're not to do it to a child who hasn't asked for it. Same with the genitals of a little girl. If she thinks later on she'd be better off without them, let her take, or have taken to her, a sharp instrument. If it proves that it's good for AIDS - it might well be, I've heard that it's said to be good for cervical cancer - let it be decided by the grown-up. It is not right, it is not moral, it is in fact wicked, to submit children to the mutilation of their genitalia, or to anyone without consent. (applause. Hitchens bangs podium) Do you understand that this elementary point only needs to be made because of wickedness enjoined by religion. The rabbi here's a fairly humane guy. He wouldn't - if he didn't think God was involved - ever consider mutilating the genitals of a child, but because it's a covenant with God, anything can be done. (laughter), Now don't you see - you laugh, but you should be crying. (laughter) I said crying! (laughter) Okay, suit yourself. (laughter)

Think of the ongoing pain also - how would you like to have someone soak ammonia into a raw wound on your genitals on a daily basis during the 10-30 days it will take to fully heal?

Also consider the issue of erection pain during healing which you've raised. You obviously don't realise that baby boys get erections too. Often the very first one will be the one that results when the doctor rubs antiseptic on the penis he's about to slice open. So the first erotic feelings will co-incide with the most pain he will likely ever feel in his life.

And you the proud daddy want to do this? I'd hate to see what you'd put him through if you weren't proud of him.....

...the popularity of modern American circumcision to a large extent the result of late 19th/early 20th century anti-masturbation quackery “spearheaded” by the co-inventor of the cornflake, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg

http://www.cirp.org/pages/whycirc.html

That is the best way to mock circumcision-pushers, in my opinion. It comes from the age of snake oil and miracle cures with cocaine in them. It’s hocus pocus carnival quackery that medical professionals should be mocked for continuing.