History of circumcision from the earliest times to the present : $b Moral and physical reasons for its performance, with a history of eunuchism, hermaphrodism, etc., and of the different operations practiced upon the prepuceRemondino, P. C. (Peter Charles)
Religion
History of circumcision from the earliest times to the present : $b Moral and physical reasons for its performance, with a history of eunuchism, hermaphrodism, etc., and of the different operations practiced upon the prepuce
Remondino, P. C. (Peter Charles)
Circumcision
From these visible and apparently easily understood conditions and
results we are now to enter a broad field, wherein the prepuce seems to
exercise a malign influence in the most distant and apparently
unconnected manner; where, like some of the evil genii or sprites in
the Arabian tales, it can reach from afar the object of its malignity,
striking him down unawares in the most unaccountable manner; making him
a victim to all manner of ills, sufferings, and tribulations; unfitting
him for marriage or the cares of business; making him miserable and an
object of continual scolding and punishment in childhood, through its
worriments and nocturnal enuresis; later on, beginning to affect him
with all kinds of physical distortions and ailments, nocturnal
pollutions, and other conditions calculated to weaken him physically,
mentally, and morally; to land him, perchance, in the jail, or even in a
lunatic asylum. Man's whole life is subject to the capricious
dispensations and whims of this Job's-comforts-dispensing enemy of man.
As strange as it may seem, this field of knowledge, this field of misery
and suffering, disease and distortion, of physical and mental obliquity,
presided over by this preputial Afrit of malignant disposition, was an
unknown, undiscovered, and therefore unexplored region for some
thousands of years, and it remained for an American to discover and
describe this vast territorial acquisition, and to annex it to the
domain of medicine, which, through its skill, could modify the influence
of the evil genius that there presided and spare humanity much of the
ills to which it had been subjected.
In this regard, Louis A. Sayre was to medicine what Columbus was to
geography. Neither Strabo nor Herodotus had anything to say regarding
what existed beyond the pillars of Hercules, and neither Hippocrates nor
Galen had anything in regard to this preputial Merlin, which in their
day, even, had its existence. Neither did Tissot nor Bienville, the two
pioneers in the field of our knowledge regarding onanism and
nymphomania, dream of the existence of this one cause of the diseases
to which they gave so much time and study. It is only some twenty years
since Louis A. Sayre read his paper, entitled "Partial Paralysis from
Reflex Irritation Caused by Congenital Phimosis and Adherent Prepuce,"
before the American Medical Association. This was the starting-point
from whence the profession entered into what had previously been a
veritable "Darkest Africa."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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