The Barbarity of Circumcision as a Remedy for Congenital Abnormality

A Victorian physician takes on one of the most entrenched practices in Western medicine. Herbert Snow, writing in 1890, argues that circumcision is neither necessary nor justified as treatment for congenital phimosis, a condition he contends is frequently misdiagnosed as pathology when it is merely normal in newborns. Snow's argument operates on historical, medical, and ethical fronts simultaneously: he traces circumcision's origins as a sacrificial religious rite rather than a hygienic necessity, challenges the cultural assumptions that led physicians to default to the most radical intervention, and proposes gentler alternatives like dilatation. The result is a text that reads as much as an ethical treatise as a medical polemic, raising questions about bodily autonomy and the boundaries of surgical intervention that still resonate. For readers interested in medical history, the evolution of surgical ethics, or the forgotten debates behind practices we now take for granted, this is a fascinating window into how cultural rituals became medical orthodoxies.