A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain (review)

Leonardo da Vinci apparently thought that his penis had a mind of its own. Whether this led him to believe that man's best friend needed bridling we are not told. Nor—presuming that his insight transcended that of any schoolboy—do we know whether he was led to consider if the penile mind was actually in its head, and—apposite here—whether the wearing of its hood might therefore be a matter for concern. Robert Darby insists only that Victorian doctors came strongly to believe that the penis needed to be controlled and regulated, and that an important means to this end was the demonization and removal of the foreskin. The first point has probably never been in dispute (insofar as the penis can stand in for sexuality in general). The second more contentious point (with or without the demonization) has been the subject of little research, least of all for Britain.

Darby makes clear that the rationale for secular circumcision was wholly a Victorian construct. In the seventeenth century the midwife Jane Sharp had considered it a "mad" practice that compromised erections and sexual activity. A similar view was held by the eighteenth-century surgeon and know-all, John Hunter. Earlier writers had even spoken of the shamefulness of the glans penis ever being exposed (except, presumably, when called to duty). Gabriele Falloppio, for one, advocated an operation to stretch the foreskin in order to meet this aesthetic criteria. But by the mid-nineteenth century medicine was overturning such views. The hitherto rarely heard of condition "congenital phimosis," for instance (the adherence of the foreskin to the glans penis, which was first conceptualised in the late seventeenth century), became a major concern. And all manner of other pathologizing claims were raised against the part: hygiene, "nerves," "insanity of the muscles" (221), theories of focal infection, racial purity (idealized in Jews), Darwinian evolution (the unnecessary vestigial appendage argument), and, above all (Darby claims), sexuality—in particular, as a means to eradicating the "evil" of solitary abuse and its alleged knock-on effects.

Certainly circumcision's medical chances would have been much less if "a significant number" of Victorian doctors had not fanned a moral mania around the loss of semen, pathologizing it as "spermatorrhoea" (201). When in 1866 the former Tractarian and High Church Anglican, E. B. Pusey—"of all people" (189)—wrote a series of hugely influential letters to The Times sensationalizing the physical and spiritual consequences of self-abuse among Oxford undergraduates (which he purported to know from the confessional in whose defence he preached), medical "hawks" were as quick to condemn the evil as to advocate the new preventive (cum-punitive) solution—a nice example of how doctors and clerics could stroke each other's interests. But it is noteworthy that medical "doves" (anti-masturbationists opposed to circumcision) were also aplenty, and even spermatorrhoea's high priest, the anti-pleasure ideologue Dr William Acton, never went so far, despite arguing that a long prepuce was one of the causes of spermatorrhoea. For Darby, Acton's reticence is "surprising" (132); it is also unfortunate, for it means that the much- vaunted Victorian architect of male medicine can only be cast as a significant accessory to the crime of male "mutilation," not the foreskin's arch-demonizer.

As this suggests, Darby's interest in the anti-masturbatory demonization of the foreskin is driven less by a need sensitively to explore a medico-moral discourse (indeed, contrariwise, he frequently seeks crudely to distinguish between "moral sentiment" and "medical science"), than a need to hammer a retrospective moral polemic. In his view Victorian doctors were sexual ignoramuses, guilty often of "mak[ing] up in rhetoric what [they] lacked in data" (280). This is ironic given Darby's own agenda...