History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present | Page 8

more neglected than in the relations the prepuce bears to infancy, prime
and old age, as will be more fully explained in the chapters in this book
which treat of cancer and gangrene. Admitting that Haviland has
exaggerated the influence of climate as an etiological factor in its
specific influence in producing certain diseases; or that M. Taine claims
more than he should for his "Thèorie des Milieux," or influence of
surroundings; or that Hutchinson has drawn the hereditary and
pedigreeal fatherhood of disease too finely; it must also be admitted
that the solid, tangible truths upon which these authors have founded
their premises are plainly visible to the most skeptical; the architectural
details of the superstructure may be defective, but the foundation is
permanent.
From the above outline it will be easier for the reader to follow out the
reasons, or the whys or wherefores, of the views expressed on medicine
in the course of the book; and, although I do not wish to enter the
medical field like a Peter the Hermit on a new crusade, to lure
thousands into the hands of the circumcisers, nor, as a new Mohammed,
promise the eternal bliss and glory of the seventh heaven to all the
circumcised, I ask of my professional brothers a calm and unprejudiced
perusal of the tangible and authentic facts that I have honestly gathered
and conscientiously commented upon from my field of vision, which
will be plainly presented in the following pages. I simply have given
the facts and my impressions: the reader is at liberty to draw his own
conclusions.
If I have been too tedious in the multiplication of incidents in support
of certain views, I must remind the reader that the verdict goes to him
who has the preponderance of testimony, and that many a lawsuit is
lost from the neglect, on the part of the loser, to secure all the available

testimony. Having brought the subject of circumcision before the bar of
public opinion, as well as that of my professional brother, I would but
illy do justice to the subject at the bar, or to myself, not to properly
present the case; as it was remarked by Napoleon, "God is on the side
of the heaviest artillery," and he who loses a battle for want of guns
should not rail at Providence if, having them on hand, he has neglected
to bring them into action.
The reasons for the existence of the book will become self-evident as
the reader labors through the medical part of the work. Our text-books
are, as a class, even those on diseases of children as a specialty,
singularly and unpardonably silent and deficient on the subject of either
the prepuce and the diseases to which it leads, or circumcision; and
even our surgical works are not sufficiently explicit, as they deal more
with the developed disease and the operative measures for its removal
than on any preventive surgery or medicine. Our works on medicine are
equally silent, and, although from a perusal of the latter part of the
book the prepuce and circumcision will be seen to have considerable
bearing on the production and nature of phthisis, this subject would,
owing to our strabismic way of studying medicine, look most
singularly out of place in a work devoted to diseases of the lungs or
throat. Owing to this poverty of literature on the subject, and that the
library of the average practitioner could therefore not furnish all the
data relating to it that the profession have in their possession, a book of
this nature will furnish them the required material whereupon to form
the basis of an opinion on the subject.
To argue that the prepuce is not such a deadly appendage because so
many escape alive and well who are uncircumcised, would be as logical
as to assume that Lee's chief of artillery neglected to properly place his
guns on the heights back of Fredericksburg. He had asserted, the night
before the battle, that not a chicken could live on the intervening
plateau between the heights and the town. On the next day, when these
guns opened their fire, the Federals were unable to reach the heights,
while many men were for hours in the iron hail-sweeping discharges of
that artillery that mowed them down by whole ranks, and yet the
majority escaped alive. We take the middle ground, and, while

admitting that many escape alive with a prepuce, claim that more are
crippled than are visibly seen, as, like Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee,"
the ways of the prepuce are dark and mysterious as well as peculiar.
A discussion of the relative merits of religious creeds, when considered
in relation to health, has been, from the nature of the subject of the
book, unavoidable. Modern Christianity but