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Title edit
Circumcision - Are You Missing Something?
Description edit
As a medical student in the 1960s I was fortunate enough to hear Dr Douglas Gairdner, a Cambridge paediatrician, lecture. He had published a paper in the BMJ in 1949 which showed that routine neonatal circumcision that had been practised in the UK up to then was not necessary or advisable. I had myself been circumcised in infancy and realised that I had had an unnecessary operation.
A few years later as a house surgeon I found myself in an operating theatre, performing a circumcision on a small, anaesthetised boy whose foreskin was too tight to retract. This was the first time I really had a close look at the foreskin, and discovered what I had lost. I was surprised how much skin there was, and started to wonder what it was there for. Medical textbooks were silent on this point. However, I refused to believe that it had no function, since all other body parts seem to be there for a reason. Soon after this, I was studying for an exam in paediatrics in 1968, and read an article in a journal by a Danish paediatrician, showing that boys with tight foreskins develop normally if they are left to mature through puberty, without being circumcised. I assumed that this spelt the death knell of circumcision of children for medical reasons. My career took a turn to adult medicine, and I gave the subject little further thought for many years.
From time to time I would check the medical literature to see if further work had been done on the function of the foreskin, but nothing of significance appeared. Then in 1992, a book by Dr Jim Bigelow, a Californian psychologist was published. It was called The Joy of Uncircumcising! At last this book explained the function of the foreskin and the effects of its removal. In 1994 I travelled to California to meet Dr Bigelow, and his associates who had developed techniques of non-surgical foreskin restoration. In California there were groups of men meeting to exchange ideas on how to improve the techniques, and help one another. There was also NOCIRC, an organisation led by a nurse, Marilyn Milos, campaigning to stop routine neonatal circumcision, which was still common practice in USA.
Languages edit
English
