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Peter Charles Remondino

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Life in San Diego: Add text.
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'''Peter Charles Remondino''' (1846-1926) was a prominent San Diego, California medical doctor and , author in the late 19th century.<ref name="remondinoautobiography">{{REFweb
|url=https://sandiegohistory.org/archives/biographysubject/remondino/
|archived=
|format=
|quote=
}}</ref> He is famous for his book that promoted male circumcision.
==Life before San Diego==
Remondino was born in 1846 in Turin (Torino) Piedmont, (''Piemonte'' in Italian), which is now a region of Italy, in 1846.<ref name="remondinoautobiography" /> Remondino migrated to America with his father at the age of eight.<ref name="remondinoautobiography" /> The family moved to Minnesota where he grew up.<ref name="remondinoautobiography" />
Remondino entered medical school at Philadelphia in 1863spoke several languages, including French, German, Latin, and Sioux.<ref name="remondinoautobiography" /> After medical school he served the United States Army as a medical doctor during the Civil War. He had some illness that he contracted from the bite of a mosquito.
Neither Peter nor Charles are Italian names so he apparently anglicized his names at some point. Remondino entered [https://www.jefferson.edu/university/skmc.html Jefferson Medical School] at Philadelphia in 1863.<ref name="remondinoautobiography" /> After medical school he served the United States Army as a medical doctor during the Civil War. He had some illness that he contracted from the bite of a mosquito. After he returned to Minnesota, he continued to have health issues. He moved to San Diego where he believed the climate would be beneficial to his health in 1873 and , where he seems to have recovered his health. He practiced medicine and surgery there,<ref name="remondinoautobiography" /> ==Life in San Diego== Remondino married Sophia Ann Earle on Sept. 27, 1877 in San Diego, California. They had four children.<ref name="remondinoautobiography" /> The doctor has been vice-president of the State Medical Society, president of the Southern California Medical Society, and president of The San Diego County Medical Society, while he served two terms, eight years in all, as a member of the State Board of Health, and for thirty-five years was a member of the Board of the U. S. Pension Examiners. For twelve years he occupied the Chair of the History of Medicine and of Medical Bibliography in the Medical Department of the University of Southern California, in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, in Los Angeles.<ref name="remondinoautobiography" /> He started San Diego's first hospital.
==Remondino's History of Circumcision==
}}</ref>
Although Remondino professed Christianity, he advocated non-therapeutic Jewish circumcision for Christians as a measure for both moral and physical health.<ref>{{REFbook
|last=Remondino
|first=Peter
|author-link=Peter Charles Remondino
|year=1891
|title=The History of Circumcision
|url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23135/23135-h/23135-h.htm#PREFACE
|work=
|editor=
|edition=
|volume=
|chapter=Preface
|pages=iii
|location=Philadelphia
|publisher=F. A. Davis
|isbn=
|quote=
|accessdate=2020-05-21
|note=
}}</ref>
Remondino evidently detested the prepuce, a normal, healthy human body part, which he described as:
<blockquote>
It is not alone the tight-constricted, glans-deforming, onanism-producing, cancer-generating prepuce that is the particular variety of prepuce that is at the bottom of the ills and ailments, local or constitutional, that may affect man through its presence. The loose, pendulous prepuce, or even the prepuce in the evolutionary stage of disappearance, that only loosely covers one-half of the glans, is as dangerous as his long and constricted counterpart.
</blockquote>
==Was Remondino circumcised?==
Remondino's distaste and dislike for the prepuce or [[foreskin]] prompts one to ask how a man could stand to have a prepuce which he detested attached to his body? History does not tell us his circumcision status, but modern psychology may give us a clue. We now know that [[Adamant father syndrome| circumcised men who become fathers]] and [[circumcised doctors]] express a preference for circumcision as Remondino did. Moreover, circumcision is a traumatic procedure.<ref name="taddio1995">{{REFjournal
|last=Taddio
|first=Anna
|author-link=
|last2=Goldbach
|first2=Morton
|author2-link=
|last3=Ipp
|first3=Moshe
|author3-link=
|last4=Stevens
|first4=Bonnie
|author4-link=
|last5=Koren
|first5=Gideon
|author5-link=
|etal=no
|title=Effect of neonatal circumcision on pain responses during vaccination in boys
|trans-title=
|language=
|journal=Lancet
|location=
|date=1995-02-04
|volume=345
|issue=
|pages=291-2
|url=http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/taddio/
|quote=
|pubmedID=7837863
|pubmedCID=
|DOI=10.1016/s0140-6736(95)90278-3
|accessdate=2020-05-21
}}</ref> Traumatized persons have a compulsion to repeat the trauma on others.<ref name="vanderkolk1989">{{REFjournal
|last=van der Kolk
|first=Bessell
|author-link=
|etal=no
|title=The compulsion to repeat the trauma: re-enactment, revictimization, and masochism
|trans-title=
|language=
|journal=Psychiatr Clin North Am
|location=
|date=1989-06
|volume=12
|issue=2
|pages=389-411
|url=http://www.traumacenter.org/products/pdf_files/Compulsion_to_Repeat.pdf
|quote=
|pubmedID=2664732
|pubmedCID=
|DOI=
|accessdate=2020-05-21
}}</ref> Remondino performed numerous circumcisions.<ref>{{REFbook
|last=Remondino
|first=Peter
|author-link=Peter Charles Remondino
|year=1891
|title=The History of Circumcision
|url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23135/23135-h/23135-h.htm#CHAPTER_XXVI
|work=
|editor=
|edition=
|volume=
|chapter=Chapter XXVI
|pages=iii
|location=Philadelphia
|publisher=F. A. Davis
|isbn=
|quote=
|accessdate=2020-05-21
|note=
}}</ref> Something compelled Remondino to write a large 346-page book to extol the alleged virtues and benefits of male circumcision.
 
If Remondino was circumcised, how would it have occurred? When Remondino was born in Turin in 1846, only Jews circumcised their infant boys, which was done by a ''mohel''. There is some speculation that Remondino was descended from Sephardic Jews, so he may have had a ritual Jewish circumcision.
 
Circumcision of adults became common after [[Lewis Albert Sayre]] (1870) performed a circumcision on a child, claimed a cure for epilepy,<ref>{{REFjournal
|last=Sayre
|first=Lewis A.
|title=Circumcision versus epilepsy, etc; Transcription of the New York Pathological Society meeting of June 8, 1870
|journal=Medical Record
|date=1870-07-15
|volume=5
|issue=10
|pages=231-234
|url=
|quote=
|pubmedID=
|pubmedCID=
|DOI=
|accessdate=
}}</ref> and spinal paralysis,<ref>{{REFjournal
|last=Sayre
|first=Lewis
|author-link=
|title=Partial paralysis from reflex irritation, caused by congenital phimosis and adherent prepuce
|journal=Transactions of the American Medical Association
|date=1870
|volume=21
|issue=
|pages=205-11
|url=
|accessdate=
}}</ref> started to perform circumcisions and popularized the surgery,<ref name="gollaher1994">{{REFjournal
|last=Gollaher
|first=David L.
|author-link=
|title=From ritual to science: the medical transformation of circumcision in America
|journal=Journal Of Social History
|date=1994-09
|volume=28
|issue=1
|pages=5-36
|url=http://www.cirp.org/library/history/gollaher/
|accessdate=2020-05-21
}}</ref> so he may have been circumcised as an adult. If he was indeed circumcised, then Remondino may be considered to be a victim of circumcision.
 
==Comment==
 
Gollaher (1994) wrote:
<blockquote>
To a modern reader, Remondino's "facts" appear to be a rambling, slapdash collection of folklore, conjecture, opinion, and pseudo-science. Hardly more scrupulous a scientist than he was an historian, he had absorbed just enough of Darwin to infer that the foreskin was a primitive vestige of the evolutionary past. "With improvement in man's condition and his gradual evolution into a higher sphere," Remondino confidently insisted, "the prepuce became a superfluity." And a nefarious one at that.
 
Born with "this unyielding tube," he estimated, ninety-five percent of uncircumcised men suffered some degree of phimosis. Although he accepted Sayre's claims at face value, Remondino was prepared to go much farther, contending that the most common diseases associated with the foreskin were not matters of reflex neurosis at all. These included rheumatic disorders, asthma, Bright's disease and other renal infections, and more ominously, impotence, malignant epithelioma and syphilis. In light of these perils, he asserted, "life-insurance companies should class the wearer of the prepuce under the head of hazardous risks."<ref name="gollaher1994" />
</blockquote>
 
{{SEEALSO}}
* [[History of circumcision]]
* [[Psychological issues of male circumcision]]
 
{{LINKS}}
 
* {{REFweb
|url=http://www.circumstitions.com/remondino.html
|archived=
|title=The prepuce might have read the hand-writing on the wall
|trans-title=
|language=
|last=Young
|first=Hugh
|author-link=
|publisher=
|website=Circumstitions
|date=
|accessdate=2020-04-22
|format=
|quote=
}}
{{REF}}
 
[[Category:Male]]
[[Category:Author]]
[[Category:Victorian doctor]]
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