I have no idea if this theory has any merit AT ALL, but, people have tried to convince me that it was an attempt to make it harder to identify Jews, should there ever be another Hitler. The timing fits (a trend started post-WW2), but I don't see how the supposed conspirators (Jewish doctors I suppose), could have gotten all the doctors to go along with it.
B.
I'm 100% sure that Hitler is neither to be blamed or to be honoured for routine cir
cision in boys and male infants in the USA and the other countries in the Anglophone world (Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand).
Routine cir
cision is an Anglophone phenomenon, not a phenomenon in the Francophone or Germanic or Scandinavian etc world, and I'll try to give you at least a sketch of the history, with the help of Australian historian of medicine Robert Darby and his great blog History of Cir
cision where you can find hundreds of historical do
ents and scholarly articles
Anon URL, plus a special page on this blog about the US
Anon URL.
In the beginning was the great Pan-European masturbation scare starting in the 18th century with phamphlets and booklets like
Onania, or: The Heinous sin of self pollution and proliferating the medical doctrine of masturbation as a fundamental cause of innumerable healthproblems and illnesses by the Swiss doctor S.A.D. Tissot and his book
L'Onanisme with its first edition published in 1760 - it became a tremendous bestseller, living through at least about 60 editions in french + translations to many other languages.
From 1760 on, "everybody" - doctors, philosophers and writers, educationalists, pedagogues - adhered to Tissot's teaching, but this was Pan-European thinking. Victorian doctors and surgeons in Great Britain - such as William Acton, J. Cooper Foster, T.B. Curling, James Copland, Jonathan Hutchinson and Athol Johnson - started in the 1840s, 50s and 60s to pave new way in the Anglophone world, but with important help from a friend from France, doctor Claude-Francois Lallemand and his massive study in three Volumes
Les pertes seminales involontaires ("Involuntary seminal losses") 1836-1842.
Lallemand was one of the most influential conjurers of imaginary "diseases", and in particular the idea, that any kind of loss of sperm - other than directly and exclusively for baby making - was cause and symptom of severe illnesses. The gospel of Tissot had been that all masturbation was bad, the gospel of Lallemand was that ANY kind of loss of sperm for any reason what so ever was extremely bad for your health. And William Acton became a firm believer on the other side of the English channel of Lallemands gospel.
Acton connected this French doctrine with several own ideas, of which one of the most important was articulated thus in 1851:
"The prepuce is a superfluous piece of skin and mucous membrane which serves no other purpose than acting as a reservoir for the collection of dirt, particularly when individuals are inattentive to cleanliness."
Even though Acton himself made very few cir
cisions, but his influential toughts paved the way for others, who in the 1850s-60s explicitely started recommending that the foreskin should be cut off before puberty. I mean, if masturbation was a grave danger to the boys health, and the foreskin didn't have any other use than being the major incitement to masturbation - why not cut it off? So said TB Curling, James Copland, Athol Johnson and sereral others.
Cir
cision as routine practice became accepted in Britain in the late 1860s, but it didn't get common until the 1880s. However, "common" in Britain never ment much more than "common" among the sons of the aristocracy and the middle class; few working class lads and country side farmboys got cir
cised. This is the big important difference between Britain - on the one hand - and its dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada) and the US on the other. Cir
cision never became as common in Britain as it later did in Australia and the US, where greater social equality and a more elaborate insurance system allowed all classes to benefit from medical advances - with the caveat, that some advances maybe were more "advances" than true advances...
Cir
cision in Britain probably had its peak around 1930, from which it started declining and Donald Gairdner's extremely important anatomical study of the foreskin - published in 1949 - told the friends of cir
cision for whom bell tolls...
While the US story originally followed the same basic presuppositions as the British, it started later and cir
cision in the US didn't become routine practice until after WWI. When WWII started, the level of cir
cision in the US already was about 40%, i.e. the same level as the British cir
cision at its peak in the 1930s. From the late 1940s, British and US cir
cision diverged more and more radically: the British declining more and more, while the US reached 90% of the male infants cir
cised in 1960.
There is much more to talk about of course, but this is enough in this post...
