Customer Reviews

Circumcision: A History Of The World's Most Controversial Surgery

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has so many interesting facets that it's hard to do it justice in a brief review. For my money, though, the chapter on how circumcision entered modern Anglo-American medicine -- how it was transformed from a Jewish ritual into a routine medical procedure deemed suitable for all boys -- is the highlight. By explaining the intellectual and cultural context of medicine in the 1870s, Gollaher explains why circumcision came to seem so reasonable (and so powerful). He clearly opposes routine circumcision, though not in a tendentious way. It's the cumulative weight of available evidence. I am the mother of two boys who were circumcised in the hospital. I had no real concept of what was done to them. The pediatrician didn't sell the procedure very hard, but he did say that most parents had it done and that he didn't see much harm in it. After reading "Circumcision," I wish my husband and I had given it more thought. We probably would have made a different decision.

You might think that the most common surgery in the United States would also be the least controversial-an operation whose medical necessity and benefits have proved beyond question. And you would be wrong. As this fascinating history of that procedure makes clear, circumcision is rooted not in medical science, but in the deepest recesses of religion and culture.

Circumcision is performed on more than one million infant and prepubescent boys around the world every year. In America, even though a growing number of physicians dispute its benefits, circumcision remains the most frequently performed elective surgical procedure. In 1995, 64.1% of US male newborns were circumcised-yet there is no proven medical benefit to this practice on normal infants. This book, by medical historian David L. Gollahar presents a fascinating history of this controversial practice and why it has persisted over time through vastly different social contexts.

As this book shows, the removal of genital foreskin has a long and varied history: from the extraordinarily painful initiation rite of the ancient Egyptians, through the Hebrew purification ritual, through its use by nineteen-century doctors as prevention for ailments including bedwetting, paralysis, syphilis, and epilepsy, to the present persistence of female circumcision in African cultures. Gollaher also addresses the current controversy over the procedure's continuance, and those opposing routine circumcision will find support here.

Gollaher concludes that "if male circumcision were confined to developing nations," similar to the status of female circumcision, "it would by now have emerged as an international cause célèbre."

David L. Gollaher (1949- ) is President and CEO of the California Healthcare Institute, a statewide public policy research and advocacy institute. He holds a PhD in History from Harvard and has served on the facilities of San Diego State University's Graduate School of Public Health and the University of California, San Diego.

The value of what medical historian Gollaher has accomplished here cannot be overstated. By producing a book of such intellectual independence and quality, he not only demystifies circumcision's cultural cachets but virtually demolishes its far-flung (and variously far-fetched) utilitarian rationales as well.

Tracing its long and stubborn history, Gollaher examines with clarity the confounded insights of circumcision apologists from Philo and Maimonides to Bruno Bettelheim and John Harvey Kellogg. But this is by Gollaher's own admission "a history, not a polemic or tract for the times," and therein lies the achievement. Maintaining an attitude of rigorous detachment, he declines to proselytize in favor of anti-cutting activists yet ultimately supports their brief by letting evidence rather than emotion hold the floor. And his summary of the foreskin restoration movement, the first to appear in a mainstream press publication, will destigmatize its appeal to a larger audience.

There are a few gaps in his otherwise meticulous research-- his language regarding sexual consequences is equivocal, and he curiously overlooks the Anand-Hickey neonatal pain investigation in favor of less reliable studies-- but the sweep and relevance of the project are no less comprehensive. "Circumcision" will go a long way toward laying the dual ghost of the procedure's imagined medical and behavioral benefits, and thus hasten the day when it is consigned to the obsolescent realm of other, ironically more advanced forms of bloodletting.

At 200+ pages you would think that the author could tell you everything you wanted to know about circumcision, but I found myself wishing he had written more. Because of Mr. Gollaher's writing I found myself fascinated by a subject that does not easily lend itself to fascination. By keeping to the facts, Mr. Gollaher is able to write a scathing rebuke of circumcision as America's cultural ritual, a ritual not unlike those practiced by 'primative' peoples. Mr. Gollaher strips away any medical justification for circumcision leaving it, as some claim, a form of legalized criminal assult on newborn babies. After reading his book, one cannot continue to belittle male circumcision as a poor cousin to female circumcision. In fact, I hope that Mr. Gollaher's book will be one of the driving forces that make non-medically justified male circumcision illegal in this country, just as female circumcision is illegal. Every prospective parent and every doctor should read this book. If education is the key to ending circumcision, then this book is a gigantic step in the right direction.

Dr. Gollaher has written the best and most intellectual bookabout circumcision since Edward Wallerstein's ground breaking book,published two decades ago. Since Wallerstein's book circumcision has fallen from about 90 to perhaps 60 perecent in the United States and virtually disappeared in all other industrialized countries.

Why should Americans persist in insisting on circumcision while Canada, Britain, all of Europe, find the curious practice as a routine disgusting?

Dr. Gollaher covers all thye myths and even touches on some of the personalities within the grass roots battle for and against the foreskin. In addition all the medical studies attempting to rationalize circumcision are stated and evaluated in a balanced way. This book does not use either a pro or con rhetoric, rather it states the history of circumcision and how what was a tribal and middle easteren mutilation of males became a routine for Americans.

Many of the irrational rationalizations FOR the procedure are exposed and documented with reasoned and referenced material.

All persons who have wondered, as I have, how such a bizzare and apparently irrational procedure could be deployed universally without religious imperative, will find this book a treasure.

When I moved to the U.S. seven years ago I was astonished to realize that most American men were circumcised as babies. Unlike Europe, people here accept the surgically altered as normal. Dr. Gollaher's excellent history explains how this came to pass and how circumcision became a powerful and complicated cultural symbol, above all a mark of bourgeois (not his word) conformity in a country where most people characterize themselves as middle class. During most of the 20th century, the uncircumcised were poorer and darker than the American mainstream; to be uncircumcised meant to be unclean, one of the unwashed. Truly amazing is the American medical profession's unthinking acceptance and reenforcement of underlying cultural stereotypes. Doctors even now advocate circumcision on grounds that would seem ridiculous for any other surgery performed on infants. I don't have a son yet, but if I do, I couldn't imagine having him circumcised after reading the evidence so cooly and elegantly presented in Dr. Gollaher's history.

I had a hard time putting this book down. It was very interesting to learn the history of something that I've always mistakingly taken for granted.

The history of circumcision in America makes it very clear how the modern day claims of the benefits aren't any different than the original claims of preventing masturbation and curing paralysis.

This is the most enjoyable (and disturbing) history book I've ever read.

David Gollaher's new book is an excellent summary of the relevant historical aspects of circumcision. In the process, he bares the surgery for what it is: a cultural mutilation with shifting and often dubious justifications. Gollaher amply demonstrates that what appear to be vastly different motivations (religion, money, obsessive hygiene) can come to the same conclusion and create strange bedfellows. For many Americans, this book will answer the key questions parents ask ("How did circumcision start?" "Why do we still do it?") and help put this very strange surgery in perspective. Non-Americans will simply continue to shake their heads at how the world's most technologically advanced country can superstitiously cut the genitals of most of its newborn boys. As circumcision recedes in the USA and once again becomes the domain of observant Jews and Moslems, another chapter will need to be added to this book.

While Gollaher correctly identifies the key issues, sometimes his accuracy lacks the rigor one would expect of an academic and health professional. For example, Gollaher explains in careful detail how a letter by British physician Douglas Gairdner published in the British Medical Journal influenced the British National Health Service to drop circumcision coverage. In fact, the NHS began in July 1948 with absolutely no coverage for infant circumcision, while Gairdner's letter did not appear until December 24, 1949, fully 17 months into the NHS.

The irony is that if this book is widely read, as it should be, it may serve to simply perpetuate much of this misinformation. However, most of the dozen or so inaccuracies I noticed are not serious and do not detract from Gollaher's central message that circumcision has a long and tortured history. This book should be required reading for all doctors and a critical part of informed consent for all expecting parents.

This is not an academic history text or a manual for parents who are trying to decide whether to circumcise their infant sons. But it will probably be of interest to both groups; after all, the list of books covering male circumcision is quite a short one, and Gollaher's book is a fascinating read.

David Gollaher provides a very readable cultural history of the practice of circumcision for the general public, explaining the orgins and prevalence of this custom in modern American medical practice. He succeeds in his goal of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The strange is made familiar as Gollaher discusses the role that circumcision has played in a wide variety of cultures from aboriginal cultures to Judaism to Islam. And the familiar becomes more and more strange as Gollaher reviews the forces that caused circumcision to become adopted into the medical community in America. The more one reads about what the foreskin is and does, the odder it seems that this is such a routine procedure.

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in a fairly balanced historical account of circumcision and the forces that have made it such an entrenched practice in the West.

David Gollaher has delivered an effective synopsis of the history of circumcision, the first of which has been published since the late nineteenth century. Much has happened in the last 100 years. It is unclear what motivated Gollaher, a historian with his doctorate in history from Harvard University, but his conclusions are dead on: if circumcision were a new medical procedure it would never garner favor or approval. Other than a few minor factual errors, his account is accurate. By giving a factual representation of the actions of circumcision's current adovates, he portrays these individuals in a very negative way. For this reason, those who favor male circumcision will find his book unacceptably accurate. I felt the book barely scratched the surface of circumcision's rich history. Each chapter left me wanting more information. I also expected more historical analysis. Rather than just recounting the historical facts Gollaher, with the benefit of his expensive education, should have provided the reader with an understanding of how the facts fit into a historical context. The facts are interesting, but what do they mean? The book, perhaps to assure a certain number of sales, is aimed at the general public, who will not doubt find the topic and treatment of it interesting. For those interested in circumcision on an academic or activist level, the book does not offer much new information. Still, it is reassuring that a mainstream American publisher had the courage to put an accurate portrayal of circumcision in print.