through the aid of lead lotions and a week's rest, made a good recovery with a whole prepuce, chagrined at his failure, but happy to have escaped immediate pain.[80] There is not much doubt but that the operation could have been suggested by its, at times, spontaneous performance, a case of which, by Cullerier, and some other additional cases have been mentioned in a former chapter. Cases occur at times, also, wherein the person having a previously normal and uninterfering prepuce has, through either herpetic inflammations or through impure connection, spurious gonorrhoea, or the use of some venereal-disease preventing-wash after connection, produced some irritation resulting in the abnormal thickening of the inner fold, or an interstitial deposit at the junction of the skin and mucous membrane, with consequent constriction, this deposit finally forming a hard, inelastic ring, which prevented a free exposure of the glans and interfered in sexual connection. In such cases,--like in stricture of the meatus,--any mechanical interference short of cutting with a knife only aggravates the existing difficulty, and it is not uncommon to have such cases apply for assistance after they have in vain tried to dilate the constricting preputial orifice. In the early writings of the Greeks, it is mentioned that among the Egyptians circumcision exempted them from a certain form of disease that affected the penis. Philon mentions particularly the immunity that the operation conferred against a species of affection which Michel Levy asserts to have been a gangrenous disease. So that, outside of any religious significance, there is no doubt that, in individual cases, circumcision has more than once been suggested, although it cannot be said that such individual cases would ever, or could, lead to its becoming a national or racial, much less a sectarian, rite. CHAPTER XVIII. THE PREPUCE AS AN OUTLAW, AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE GLANS.