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I am an independent scholar and freelance writer living in Canberra, the capital of Australia. I began my writing and research career as a literary historian, with a {{PhD }} on Australian literature and politics in the 1930s, but my interests have broadened since then to include many topics in cultural, social and medical history, as well as ethics and current affairs. My major published work so far has been a detailed account of the rise and fall of routine "health" circumcision in Britain (A Surgical Temptation, 2005), and since then I have written widely on medical, historical and ethical aspects of both male and female circumcision - which I regard as primarily a human rights and social justice issue, not really a medical issue at all. I have also prepared a collection of the medical writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, Round the Red Lamp (Valancourt Books, 2007), and an edited edition of Elements of Social Science by the great Victorian iconoclast George Drysdale. Although he is largely forgotten today, his book was extremely popular throughout the second half of the 19th Century as a source of information and advice on "the facts of life" and especially contraception. My most recent article is "The child's right to an open future: Is the principle applicable to non-therapeutic circumcision", published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, July 2013. For further information see the following websites: