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Originally Posted by melissa_honeybee
What the heck happened to force this change..it still baffles me..
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The first half of the last century was a pretty amazing time. Technology moved forward more during that 50 years than in all of history before that. Just think, before, all movement was by horse, sailing ship or at the very last, train and the trains were such low technology that they moved by sheer force instead of technology. We learned how to move rapidly over the face of the earth or above it in airplanes. We went from mostly working to feed ourselves from the land to factories. We learned how to make steel and we conquered electricity. We learned to talk with each other by wire rather than face to face. Before this time, doctors mostly set broken bones and stitched up wounds and medicine and witchdoctors had much in common outside that. There were so many advancements in sicience in that short time that it was impossible to keep up with them. It was a constant marvel. We also have to remember that the scientific method of research was not very scientific at the time. If you did action "A" and result "B" happened, it was concluded that "B" was the result of "A" when it was very possible that the two events had nothing to do with each other. Thus, if you circumcised a 7 year old boy and he quit wetting the bed, it was concluded that the circumcision cured the bed wetting instead of the two events being totally unrelated. In this example, the doctor would report that circumcision cured bedwetting.
Also remember that during that time, the general populace had very little medical knowledge at all and very little opportunity to research to evaluate what they were told. At that time, many couldn't even read and it was very common that people had no more than a 3rd or 4th grade education. With this lack of education and lack of resources, a doctor was probably the most highly educated man in most smaller towns. Back then, many lawyers got their legal education by clerking for a judge or assisting a lawyer in an apprenticeship arrangement and may not even have a 4 year college degree. Just in the last year, one of these judges retired from the bench in my hometown. Before becoming a judge, he had been a prize fighter!
In this environment, if a doctor told you something, it was accepted at face value and without question. I remember when I was young, many people died of "old age." This was given as the cause of death because the doctors didn't have the diagnostic equipment or knowledge to diagnose many of the problems that seniors suffer and it was very common that someone would die of one of these maladies without ever being diagnosed. For instance, they didn't know what alzhiemers disease was. People who were suffering from this were said to be senile, childish or forgetful as a result of old age and they eventually died of "old age." Of course, now we know that everything they were telling us about circumcision was false, we can clearly see that this was from ignorance but in that day and time and with the level of education among both the medical profession and laypeople, it is easy to see how this came to be. The problem is that there is still a tremendous level of ignorance that persists in both the medical profession and the general populace and we seem dedicated in continuing the ignorance instead of learning.
The primary reason for this ignorance is the continuing ignorance of the medical profession. When doctors have the opportunity to study to learn to cure cancer or other "glamorous" diseases, there is not much of an incentive to research something as accepted as circumcision. It is also difficult for a male doctor who is circumcised to accept that he has been damaged by circumcision since as far as he can tell, his penis works perfectly fine. There is also the factor that the vast majority of neonatal circumcisions are performed by OB/GYNS who are specialists in the female reproductive organs and have little professional interest in researching the form and function of the male reproductive organ so the ignorance persists. I also have to wonder about the trend for an increasingly larger percentage of OB/GYNS and pediatricians being females instead of males and the effect that has on the practice.
So, to put it into a nutshell, Dr. Lewis A.J. Sayre of Philadelphia decided that circumcision would stop boys from masturbating and circumcised a boy. Whether he actually stopped masturbating or not is up to question. Maybe, he was just very careful after that but Sayre thought he had been successful and began reporting it widely. As other doctors picked up the trend, they observed other miraculous cures that probably had just run their course and would have ended anyway and they attributed the cure to the circumcision. In this hysteria, they eventually got to the point that they would hypothesize that circumcision would prevent something with no research at all and spread that around. This became "common knowledge" in the medical profession although it had no scientific basis at all and then it was spread to the general populace where it became "common knowledge." Eventually, as that common knowledge was refuted, it was realized that circumcision of male infants is an incredibly lucrative medical practice with recently reported prices of up to $700.00 per procedure that only takes a few minutes. Under these circumstances, it is predictable that the medical profession is going to continue to promote it for their own enrichment. Now that the medical "benefits" have all been disproven, medical practitioners only have the "tradition" of circumcision to fall back on if they find a parent that has any background at all. "If the father was circumcised, it is very important that the son be circumcised or he could suffer from severe psychological problems." Of course, the men who were circumcised and their fathers were not circumcised had no psychological problems because of it but this is something that is lost on the vast majority of parents and parents don't want their child to be emotionally scarred for life so they acquiesce to the procedure for their sons and the torture and mutilation continues.
Frank
:LOL
. She said she couldn't even stand the smell of it at the time.
