A Surgical Temptation

In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors urged parents to circumcise their sons as a routine precaution against every imaginable sexual dysfunction, from syphilis and phimosis to masturbation and bed-wetting. Thirty years later the procedure again came under hostile scrutiny, culminating in its disappearance during the 1960s. Why Britain adopted a practice it had traditionally abhorred and then abandoned it after only two generations is the subject of A Surgical Temptation. Robert Darby reveals that circumcision has always been related to the question of how to control male sexuality. This study explores the process by which the male genitals, and the foreskin especially, were pathologized as a source of physical and moral decay. But A Surgical Temptation is not merely of historical interest. Why does circumcision usually mean circumcision of infants? Why does the pressure for "health" circumcision continue? These questions cannot be answered without reference to its nineteenth century origins as a mechanism for sexual discipline. A Surgical Temptation provides essential background to current debates about the medical, ethical, and social aspects of circumcision, and the ongoing demonization of the foreskin in our own time.