In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors urged parents to circumcise their sons as a routine precaution against every imaginable sexual dysfunction, from syphilis and phimosis to masturbation and bed-wetting. Thirty years later the procedure again came under hostile scrutiny, culminating in its disappearance during the 1960s. Why Britain adopted a practice it had traditionally abhorred and then abandoned it after only two generations is the subject of A Surgical Temptation....
In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors u...
Condemned by critics as "the Bible of the brothel" and "the most demoralising book of the century," "Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion "(later retitled "The Elements of Social Science") was one of the most daring critiques of Victorian morality ever published. Presenting a case for free sexual unions before marriage, widespread contraception and family limitation, use of condoms to guard against venereal disease, and the replacement of Judeo-Christian spirituality with a science-based "religion" (really, a set of humane values) that respected the human body, Drysdale challenged the...
Condemned by critics as "the Bible of the brothel" and "the most demoralising book of the century," "Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion "(later ret...
In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors urged parents to circumcise their sons as a routine precaution against every imaginable sexual dysfunction, from syphilis and phimosis to masturbation and bed-wetting. Thirty years later the procedure again came under hostile scrutiny, culminating in its disappearance during the 1960s. Why Britain adopted a practice it had traditionally abhorred and then abandoned it after only two generations is the subject of A Surgical Temptation....
In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors u...