A Surgical Temptation or The Body of Frankensteins Monster

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

Author: Robert Darby

In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors urged parents to circumcise their sons as a routine precaution against every imaginable sexual dysfunction, from syphilis and phimosis to masturbation and bed-wetting. Thirty years later the procedure again came under hostile scrutiny, culminating in its disappearance during the 1960s.

Why Britain adopted a practice it had traditionally abhorred and then abandoned it after only two generations is the subject of A Surgical Temptation. Robert Darby reveals that circumcision has always been related to the question of how to control male sexuality. This study explores the process by which the male genitals, and the foreskin especially, were pathologized, while offering glimpses into the lives of such figures as James Boswell, John Maynard Keynes, and W. H. Auden. Examining the development of knowledge about genital anatomy, concepts of health, sexual morality, the rise of the medical profession, and the nature of disease, Darby shows how these factors transformed attitudes toward the male body and its management and played a vital role in the emergence of modern medicine.

An erudite, lively, and sometimes combative investigation of a formative period in medical history, A Surgical Temptation will inform and engage any reader with an interest in the history of medicine, gender, sexuality, the practice of circumcision in the world today, and the ways in which culture fashions the human body.

Table of Contents:

1	Introduction : the willful organ meets fantasy surgery	3
2	The best of your property : what a boy once knew about sex	22
3	Pathologizing male sexuality : the masturbation phobia and the invention of spermatorrhea	44
4	The shadow of Parson Malthus : sexual morals from the Georgians to the Edwardians	73
5	The priests of the body : doctors and disease in an antisensual age	94
6	A source of serious mischief : William Acton and the case against the foreskin	118
7	A compromising and unpublishable mutilation : clitoridectomy and circumcision in the 1860s	142
8	One of the most grievous diseases of humanity : spermatorrhea in British medical practice	167
9	The besetting trial of our boys : finding a cure for masturbation	189
10	This unyielding tube of flesh : the rise and fall of congenital phimosis	215
11	Prevention is better than cure : sanitizing the modern body	236
12	The purity movement and the social evil : circumcision as a preventive of syphilis	260
13	The stigmata of a gentleman : circumcision and British society	285
14	Conclusion : the end of the culture of abstinence	311

Book about: Éthique de Travail

The Body of Frankenstein's Monster: Essays in Myth and Medicine

Author: Cecil Helman

Frankenstein. Werewolves. Dracula. These images aren't just imaginary creatures -- they're also powerful symbols of the body. The body can be thought of as a machine made up of parts like Frankenstein's monster, or as a creature ruled by animalistic urges, or as an entity that's vulnerable to infection from a diseased fiend. In "The Body of Frankenstein's Monster," Cecil Helman, M.D., expands our view of our bodies by exploring its cultural and artistic representations.

Publishers Weekly

These inquisitive essays are a strong antidote to modern medicine's tendency to treat the body as a machine. A physician, anthropologist and folklorist based in London, Helman undertakes poetic, cross-disciplinary forays for high-tech medicine's connections to myth, magic and metaphor. He relates the placebo effect to mesmerism, interprets the Frankenstein story as a harbinger of transplant surgery and reads an X-ray image as a white-branched Tree of Life. From medical models of premenstrual tension in which women are slaves of a cyclical moon, he moves on to consider moonstruck werewolves, Sasquatch, Yeti and women's long, flowing hair as a symbol of animality. Germ imagery in daily language (``an epidemic of muggings'') leads him to unravel a ``germistic way of thinking,'' which blames our misfortunes on external forces. A medically informed social critic, Helman sees the watch and the clock as central icons of a civilization in which ambitious ``type A personalities'' are rewarded for their ruthless behavior. (May)

Kirkus Reviews

Helman—professor of medicine (University College, London), family physician, and cultural historian—draws on his wide-ranging interests to offer a vivid, personable, and insightful exploration of physiology and fiction—of the interaction of the objective functioning of the human body and the subjective experience of it, as well as of the political analogues and social metaphors it inspires in both historic and contemporary terms. One version of the body, Frankenstein's monster, is, Helman says, an assemblage of otherwise alien parts existing in a balance of power, a "somatic democracy" disrupted occasionally by "aliens" such as transplants or "invaded" by germs (formerly demons), to which the poor, the weak, and the "morally inept" are particularly susceptible. This version of the body, the author explains, is more political than another version, "The Premenstrual Werewolf," which emphasizes the moral dimension of the body, destroyed by the release of repressed animal forces—contagious ones—expressed in a disease such as AIDS. At another extreme, in "The Medusa Machine," Helman depicts the body as a machine, an extension of TV and the computer, imperfectly projected in anthropomorphic robots. The last essay, "A Time of the Heart," traces the Type-A personality—aggressive, ambitious, impatient: the "Numerical Man" dominated by time, money, and statistics, acting out the values of the postindustrial society, a "moral marionette" whose success will cause his heart to fail. Helman's illustrations are especially apt and moving: an old man dies, the sitcom he was watching still reflected in his eyes, his dentures on the floor next to him, grinning backat the laughing figures. Or Helman reflects on the psychological damage to Isaac, the phobia he may have acquired against fathers, knives, rams, his post-traumatic syndrome. But the book is held together primarily by Helman's charm; it has the imperfect coherence of Frankenstein's monster, with which he is so fascinated. With its sweep, perception, originality, and felicitous use of language—an artistic and intellectual achievement.