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wikify Ryan McAllister; merged content from "An Elephant in the Hospital"
'''Child Circumcision: An Elephant in the Hospital''' by [[Ryan McAllister]], Ph.D, Executive Director of [[NotJustSkin.org]] and others, is an educative video about [[MGM]].
One of NotJustSkin's primary missions is to educate the public about violations of informed consent or bodily integrity. In the U.S., [[MGM|male genital cutting]], more often called [[circumcision]], is commonly practiced even though parents rarely receive the information that would be required to give informed consent to any other procedure. Circumcision is the only procedure where a doctor can legally amputate part of a nonconsenting child without any medical reason.
'''NOTE:''' This presentation includes some graphic slides necessary to present the procedure and anatomy being discussed.
# Stop [[masturbation]]! Advocates were aided by the puritanical moral sentiment of the day, as circumcision was promoted as a way to discourage [[masturbation]]. (Modern surveys have actually shown the opposite to be true.)
# Circumcision as a cure for maladies. In 1870, Dr. Lewis Sayre of New York (and vice president of the newly-formed American Medical Association), examined a boy who was unable to straighten his legs and whose condition had so far defied regular treatment. Upon noting that the boys genitals were inflamed, Sayre hypothesized that chronic irritation of the boys foreskin had paralyzed his knees via reflex neurosis. Sayre circumcised the boy, and within a few weeks he recovered from his paralysis. After additional positive results, Sayre began to promote circumcision as an orthopedic remedy, and his prominence within the medical profession and the newly formed AMA allowed him to reach a wide audience. Over the next decades, the list of ailments reputed to be treatable through circumcision grew to include hernia, bladder infections, kidney stones, insomnia, rheumatism, epilepsy, asthma, erectile dysfunction, syphilis, insanity, and a handful of other syndromes.
# Hospitals. Compounded by cause no. 1, as hospitals proliferated in urban areas, more children were under the care of physicians in hospitals rather than with midwives in the home. Some historians have even theorized that circumcision became a class marker of those wealthy enough to afford a hospital birth.
# Easier Surgical Procedures. The discovery in 1885 of hypodermic cocaine as a local anaesthetic made it easier for doctors without expertise in the use of chloroform to perform minor surgeries. Several mechanically-aided circumcision techniques, forerunners of modern clamp-based circumcision methods, were first published in the medical literature of the 1890s, allowing surgeons to perform circumcisions more safely and successfully.