Circumcision and STDs

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This article discusses the claims that male circumcision reduces the incidence of STDs other than HIV/AIDS. For a discussion of the alleged claims made regarding HIV, see Circumcision and HIV.

Circumcision promotion

Attitudes from the early days of opinion-based medicine that have long been disproved in the era of science-based medicine continue to influence thought today. Peter Charles Remondino's 1891 book said:

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. If we look over the world’s history, since in the latter years of the fifteenth century syphilis came down like a plague, walking with democratic tread through all walks and stations in life, laying out alike royalty or the vagrant, the curled-haired and slashed-doubleted knight, or the tonsured monk, we must conclude that syphilis has caused more families to become extinct than any ordinary plague, black death, or cholera epidemic. Without wishing to enter into a history of syphilis, it is not outside of the province of this book to allude to its frequency and spread.

The absence of the prepuce and the non-absorbing character of the skin of the glans penis, made so by constant exposure, with the necessary and unavoidably less tendency that these conditions give to favor syphilitic inoculation, are not evidently without their resulting good effects. Now and then syphilitic primary sores are found on the glans, or even in the urethra or on the outside skin of the penis, or outer parts of the prepuce; but the majority are, as a rule, situated either back of the corona or on the reflected inner fold of the prepuce immediately adjoining the corona, or they may be in the loose folds in the neighborhood of the frenum, the retention of the virus seemingly being assisted by the topographical condition and relation of the parts, and its absorption facilitated by the thinness of the mucous membrane, as well as by the active circulation and moisture and heat of the parts.

Abraham Leo Wolbarst (1914), an ardent promoter of circumcision, collected the opinions of several physicians and published those opinions as evidence for his argument that circumcision was beneficial and healthful. He published an opinion-based article that claimed without evidence that circumcision prevented "venereal disease" now known as sexually transmitted disease. Wolbarst claimed that non-therapeutic neonatal circumcision prevented numerous diseases, including venereal disease (now known as sexually transmitted disease).

The world at war

Wolbarst's paper was published in January 1914. World War I started in August 1914.

Military commanders have a duty to keep their military personnel in good health and ready for action. With no better data than the false data supplied by such as Remondino and Wolbarst, many commanders, knowing that soldiers may visit prostitutes, ordered their personnel to be circumcised.

When World War II started in September 1939, the situation was little changed and again circumcision was ordered by many commanders.

This practice was abandoned at least 60 years ago.

Contemporary view based on medical science

Evidence-based medicine does not support the opinion of the early circumcision-promoters.

The circumcision promoters claimed that the sub-preputial space was a filth and disease bearing repository of illness that was best eliminated by circumcision. However, Parkash et al. (1982) showed that the sub-preputial moisture contained lytic material with antiseptic qualities that protected the area from disease.

Smith et al. (1987) found evidence that the foreskin protected against acquisition of non-gonococcal urethritis, possibly "by effecting the physiologic milieu of the glans penis, by association with post-coital hygiene behavior, or by local immune defense mechanisms acting against the agent."

External links

• (10 March 2008). Circumcision and Sexually Transmitted Infections, www.cirp.org, Circumcision Reference Library. Retrieved 22 May 2020.

• Hill, George (14 June 2008). Ch. 3: Alleged Medical Benefits of Circumcision (DOC Genital Integrity Statement), Research hub, Doctors Opposing Circumcision. Retrieved 22 May 2020.

• Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), www.doctorsopposingcircumcision.org, Doctors Opposing Circumcision. Retrieved 22 May 2020.