P. C. Remondino

“ It would seem really as if a prepuce was a dangerous appendage at any time, and life-insurance companies should class the wearer of a prepuce under the head of hazardous risks, for a circumcised laborer in a powder-mill or a circumcised brakeman or locomotive engineer runs actually less risk than an uncircumcised tailor or watchmaker. They recognize the danger that lurks in a stricture, but what a prepuce can and does do, they entirely ignore. ”

“ The long-continued observation and experiments of this noble physician in his endeavor to protect humanity from the ravages of small-pox by his discovery of vaccination, met at last with a suitable recognition, for he received by a vote of Parliament the sum of £30,000, and special honors were awarded him. It is a singular fact that all of the benefactors of the human race—those who have benefited it by discoveries of any kind whatever—have met with the most violent opposition, treachery, and often disgrace, before they could make the world see the value of their discoveries. ”

“ The celebrated letter of Moses Mendelssohn to the Swiss clergyman, Lavater, in answer to a dedication of the latter to Mendelssohn, is probably the best exposition of the essence of the Jewish faith that can be found. Therein he says: “We believe that all other nations of the earth have been commanded by God to adhere to the laws of nature. Those who regulate their conduct according to this religion of nature and of reason are called virtuous men of other nations, and are the children of eternal salvation.” Such a religion does not unsettle man’s mind. ”

“ With all its supposed superior intelligence, there is no fatter pasture for quacks and impostors than that presented by the people of the United States. Whenever I see the poor, intelligent, broad-minded physician struggling along, barely able to procure for himself the necessaries required to maintain himself with proper books and appliances, while the itinerant quack or dogmatic practitioner rolls in undeserved affluence, I question the wisdom of our ethical code. ”

“ In those days, but for the protecting double fold of the preputial envelope that protected it from the thorns and cutting grasses, the coarse bark of trees, or the stings and bites of insects, the glans penis of primitive man would have often looked like the head of the proverbially duel-disfigured German university student, or the Bacchus-worshiping nose of a jolly British Boniface. So that in those days, unless primitive man was intended to have an organ that resembled a battle-scarred Roman legionary, a prepuce was an absolute necessity. ”

“ With other creeds and religions, medicine, disease, as well as the physical phenomena affecting nature, were believed to be the arbitrary expression of anger of their gods, and that the cure of disease, or alterations in physical phenomena, were to be as arbitrarily effected, regardless of the existence or action of physical laws. It is to be regretted that one of the sects which has sprung from the Hebraic creed, and which worships the same God, has been unable to emancipate itself or its people from the idea of an arbitrary theological doctrine of the origin and control of disease. ”

“ They little dream of the prostatic troubles that lie in wait for the unwary sitter on cold places, ready to pounce upon him like the treacherous Indian lying in ambush,—troubles that carry in their train all the battalions of urethral, bladder, kidney disease and derangments, and subsequent blood disorganization, which often begin in a chilled perineum, and, in conjunction with the local disease that may result, end in handing us over to Father Charon for ferriage across the gloomy Styx long before our life’s journey is half over. ”

“ At times, Nature, as if impatient of the slow march of gradual evolution, and exasperated at this persistent and useless as well as dangerous relic of a far-distant prehistoric age, takes things in her own hands and induces a sloughing to take place, which rids it of its annoyance. In the far-off land of Ur, among the mountainous regions of Kurdistan, something over six thousand years ago, the fathers of the Hebrew race, inspired by a wisdom that could be nothing less than of divine origin, forestalled the process of evolution by establishing the rite of circumcision. ”

“ The physician, such as is actively engaged in the daily practice of his profession, instead of having no religion, is really a practical religionist, and, although he may subscribe to no outer ceremonial form or dogma, his life is such that a Confucian, a Buddhist, a Christian, or a Hebrew can behold in him the practitioner of the essence of either of their religions,—a conception carried out by Lessing, in his play of “Nathan the Wise,” where the Jew, the Saracen, and Crusader teach the impressive lesson that nobleness is bound by no confession of faith or religion ”

“ I have often felt the need of such a work; people can understand emergency or accident surgery, military surgery, or reparative surgery, but such a thing as surgery to remedy a seemingly medical disease, or what might be called the preventive practice of surgery, is something they cannot understand. First, and not the least, among the incentives to skepticism on this subject is the unwelcome fact of a surgical operation, which, no matter how trivial it may seem to the surgeon, is a matter of considerable magnitude to the patient, his parents, or friends ”

“ The success and beauty of the Mosaic law is its squarely facing the conditions of actual life, and its absence from nonsense or nauseating sentimentality. Were our present churches to observe more of this plain talk, for which the good old Anglo-Saxon is as fully expressive and convincing as the old Hebrew, and deal less in rhetorical flourishes and figurative mean-nothings to tickle the ears of our modern Pharisees, mankind as well as womankind would be infinitely so much the better off, mentally, morally, and physically, and there would be less of the conflict between science and religion. ”

“ That many, through all these trials, were forced to embrace other religions is not astonishing. In Spain apostacy was to no purpose, as the Inquisition could not be expected to split hairs in regard to an apostate Jew, when it sent the best of Gothic blood, raised in the Catholic faith, to the auto da fé or the scaffold,—the rack respecting neither faith nor profession that fell into its clutches. ”

“ How faithful the sculptors and artists were to nature and life in their representations can well be imagined by a critical examination of the Apollo Belvidere, where the difference of the scrotal position that exists between the right and left testicles is carried out to the minutest anatomical detail. In our age it is hard to conceive why their most masculine men should be deified, and all their gods represented as the most perfect of bodily development, while at the same time the finest physical specimens of manhood were doomed to a life of the most rigorous continence. ”

“ Sex has no influence on the liability that tends to being attacked, the proportion between the sexes being about equal. As to age, he finds the greatest proportion to be between three and ten years, but he has often treated those of either sex even at the age of fourteen and up to seventeen years. It is absolutely necessary to examine the external genitals and the urine of those affected by this disease, as phlegmasiæ of the vagina, of the vestibule or urethra in girls, or the practice of onanism, or lithiasis, cystitis, or pyelitis may be the cause of the disease. ”

“ Nature—always careful that nothing should interfere with the procreative functions—had provided him with a sheath or prepuce, wherein he carried his procreative organ safely out of harm’s way, in wild steeple-chases through thorny briars and bramble-brakes, or, when hardly pushed, and not able to climb quickly a tree of his own choice, he was by circumstances forced up the sides of some rough-barked or thorny tree. ”

“ So with the prepuce, the luxury and idleness, voluptuousness and consequent feasting incident to its being supplanted in its original functions by the perineal cloth, which left it thenceforth unemployed, led it in the pathway of disease and death. This first innovation in civilization was to the prepuce the beginning of its decay and fall. ”

“ In this irritation that the prepuce is liable to cause, we have not only to encounter the dangers that its thickenings or indurations may bring on in their train, in the shape of cancer, gangrene, or hypertrophies, but other and no less serious results are liable to follow a herpetic attack, or in consequence of an attack of balanitis or posthitis. The dysuria attending any of these conditions may be the initial move for such a serious complication that life may be brought to a sudden end, even in infancy, to say nothing of the ease with which life is taken off in after years and in old age ”

“ He devotes himself to the skin of the whole organ; beginning at the prepuce he gradually works backward, removing the whole skin of the penis—a flaying alive, and nothing more. Should the victim betray any sign of weakness, or allow as much as a sigh or groan to escape him, or even allow the muscles of the face to betray the fact that he is not immensely enjoying the occasion, the bride elect at once leaves him for good, saying that she does not wish a woman for a husband. A large proportion of the male population annually die from this operation. ”

“ Although seeking neither converts nor political power and influence, he has been hunted down, massacred, and chased about as a dangerous beast. As the children of the great Rabbi Moses Mendelssohn asked of their father: “Is it a disgrace to be a Jew? Why do people throw stones at us and call us names?” ”

“ But, seeing that the prepuce, to say nothing of being neither nose, eye, nor ear to warn one away from danger, or a leg to run away on after once in it, having not even the precautionary sensitiveness of a cat’s moustachios, it cannot, in any way that we can see, be compared to any other useful part of the body.
All attempts to find reasons for its existence that are of real benefit to man have so far proved unsatisfactory, and, unlike the reasons for its removal, are, as a rule, founded on speculation. ”

“ Luther’s dream of restoring religion to its primitive purity has come to but as poor realization at the hands of his so-called followers, which leads one to think that if the martyrs of the Reformation could come back and see the fruits of their martyrdom—suffered that pure religion might live—they would conclude that, for all the resulting good accomplished, they might as well have kept a whole skin and a whole set of bones. ”

“ The subject of climatic influences will be more fully discussed further on; but climate, as a factor of habits and usages in one part of the world, that are incomprehensible to those living in others, plays a part that is but little appreciated or understood; whether it be the question of diet, dress, or custom, climate exerts its influence in no uncertain manner. As Sulpicius Severus remarked to the Greek monks, when they accused the Gaulish monks with voracity and gluttony, “That which you of Greece consider as superfluous, the climate of Gaul renders into a positive necessity.” ”

“ Herein dwelt the great benefit of the early practice of medicine among the Greeks, and to the physical understanding and supervision of human nature by the Hebraic law may be said that the creed owes its greatness and stability, and the Hebrew race its sturdy stamina. The wisdom of the Mosaic laws is something that always challenges admiration, the secret being that it did not separate the moral from the physical nature of man. ”

“ Athletic sports are not of necessity conducive to long life, even if they are to temporary robust health; but there is no mistaking the fact that the sedentary and in-door life of the average Jew is a deteriorator to health and life, and especially among that class of families who are poor and keep no servant; from heredity and home education having adopted unhygienic customs, in which they have grown up,—in these a total disregard for all ventilation forms a part. Were an uncircumcised race so to live, scrofula and phthisis would be the inevitable result. ”

“ The ancient Germans lived a life of chastity until their marriage, and to their observance of a chaste life can be attributed the superior physical development of the race, as both males and females were not only fully developed, but were not enervated by either sexual excess or inclinations before having offspring, which were necessarily robust and healthy. To obtain the same results in a nation given to indolence and luxury, and lax in its morality, some physical restraint was required, and we therefore find the practice of infibulation coming from the warm countries to the East. ”

“ We must mix medicine with our religion and make the clergy into physicians, or ordain our physicians into full-fledged clergymen.
The science of medicine, or what might be called the natural ways of nature through its physical laws, is true to itself; the fault lies in our interpretation of its phenomena, which we fail to study with sufficient discriminative precision and nicety. We have repeatedly mistaken causes and results from this want of close observance and of precision, attributing results to causes which did not exist. ”

“ It has already been suggested that the prepuce does not at all ages bear the same analogous relation to man. In childhood, especially during our earliest years, it is out of all proportion in size when compared to the rest of the organ, or to any use it may have placed to its credit. Man does not, then, certainly need that refinement of nervous sensitiveness in the corona that is useful in after life in inducing the flow or ejaculation of the seminal fluid; neither is there at that age much of a corona to protect. ”

“ On the other hand, the Jew has the simplest of religious creeds; he neither wastes useful time, robs himself of sleep, nor becomes dyspeptic in hunting for hidden meanings in some ambiguous scriptural phrase; he is satisfied with his creed, his dogmas are firmly anchored, and the nature of his religion being a sort of family congregation, he is not called upon to go out in search of proselytes, any more than the father of an already large family feels called upon to go out and hunt up the homeless, that he may convert his home into a promiscuous orphan-asylum. ”

“ The relative longevity between the Hebrew race and the Christian nations that dwell together under like climatic and political conditions indicates a stronger tenacity on the part of the Jewish part of the nations to life, a greatly less liability to disease, and a stronger resistance to epidemic, endemic, and accidental diseases. By some authorities it has been held that the occupations followed by the Jew are such as do not compel him to risk his life, as he neither follows any labor requiring any great and continued exertion, nor any that subjects him to any great exposure ”

“ Through middle life, unless the prepuce be the subject of some vicious conformation, little inconvenience may result from its presence, except it be from the dangers to infections already pointed out during this period of life; an ordinarily movable and retractable prepuce will not acquire the condition of phimosis, unless it be through disease or accident; but with our entrance into old age, or after having passed our vigorous prime, the torment of the days of our infancy and childhood come to harass us again. ”