It is related by Leonard, in his “Memoires,”—who, in his capacity of hair-dresser in ordinary to her Majesty, the unfortunate Marie-Antoinette, had ample opportunity for picking up all the domestic small talk of the royal family and their affairs,—that Louis XVI, in addition to all his troubles and the indignities which he suffered, besides finally being beheaded, was afflicted with a congenital phimosis which prevented the flow of semen from properly discharging itself. It appears that his Majesty was no little annoyed at not being able to procure an heir to his throne. His royal sister-in-law, the Countess d’Artois, had given birth to a prince, the Duke of Angouleme, who was the heir presumptive to the throne in case of the non-issue from Louis; another sister-in-law had been brought to bed with a royal princess, and here was the king himself without any prospective possibility of any heir. Like all kings, he was more or less unreasonable; so he blamed his first surgeon in ordinary for all these short-comings,—as if it were the duty of these court surgeons, among their many other tribulations, to furnish heirs to thrones. The surgeon finally informed his Majesty that if he wished to become a father it would be necessary for him to submit to the slight operation that was the subject of the church festival of the first day of January, namely, the Feast of the Circumcision. His most Christian Majesty entered a protest to this acknowledgment that there was anything in Judaism worth imitating. The surgeon insisted that the operation celebrated on the first of January would put him in a way to have the much-desired heir. The king finally waived all objections from any religious scruples, but could not be brought to look at the prospective operation with any sentiments of agreeable expectation.
The king finally became good-natured, and a touch of that plebeian jollity which at times made him quite agreeable spread over his features as he imagined the ludicrousness of the spectacle that would be presented by a king of France in the hands of these handlers of the scalpel, treating him like an African savage. He took some days to consider the matter. On the next day he informed M. Louis, his first surgeon in ordinary, that he had decided on submitting to the operation, and the day and hour were fixed. The royal circumcision, however, never took place, as it is most likely that in the privacy of his chamber his Majesty worked, like many a plebeian or man of low degree had done before him and has done since, to bring a refractory prepuce to terms. The king was somewhat of a mechanic, as his skill as a locksmith has passed into history; so that it is not unlikely that, with what little information he had on the subject, he managed to sufficiently dilate, by scarification and stretching, the preputial opening, as from the year 1778 the queen had three children.
Cases of attempted self-circumcision are not rarities, as people have some inexplicable idea that a self-inflicted cut is not as painful as one that is done by others. The writer well remembers being called to assist one of these domestic surgeons who had undertaken to circumcise himself with his wife’s great scissors. The man had a very long but thin and narrow prepuce that had always been an annoyance to him. The writer had circumcised two of his children for the same malformation, and the father, seeing the benefit to these two, determined to share in the general benefit; but at the same time he arranged to do it all by himself, and give the family and the surgeon a sample of his courage and a simultaneous surprise party. Securing the scissors, he wended his way unperceived into the recesses of his wood-shed. The mental and physical anguish the poor man underwent, and what soliloquies he must have addressed to the rafters of the wood-shed while making up his mind and screwing up his physical courage for the last fell act with the scissors, can hardly be described, as, in all probability, they were of the most rambling and inconsistent order. At any rate, he must have reached a climax in time and grasped the fated prepuce with a revengeful glee, and, with all his powers concentrated in his good right hand, he must have closed the remorseless blades of the scissors on the unlucky prepuce. When the surgeon arrived at the scene of carnage, he was directed to the wood-shed, on the outskirts of which hovered the family, frantic with fear and apprehension; within, in the darkest corner, with wildly dilated eyes, and performing a fantastic pas seul, was a man with a huge pair of scissors dangling between his legs, warning all hands as they valued his life not to approach or lay a hand on him. He had shut the scissors down so that it clinched the thin prepuce, and there his courage and determination had forsaken him; he lost his presence of mind, and was not even able to take off the scissors; he had simply given one wild, blood-curdling yell—like the last winding notes from Roland’s horn at Roncevalles—that had brought his family to the wood-shed-door, and they had then sent for a surgeon. New terrors here awaited the unlucky victim for self-circumcision. He dreaded lest the surgeon should accidentally have it enter his mind to finish the operation with the scissors, and in that case he would be helpless, as the surgeon would, undoubtedly, have a sure and tender hold of it. After executing a number of pas à deux on the Magilton step, while the surgeon endeavored to reassure him and gain his confidence, promising to remove the scissors without inflicting any further harm, he was finally allowed to approach, and, while the patient assumed a Taglioni attitude on one foot, the other leg being extended at right angles with the body and his hands clawing the air, the scissors was removed. The patient, through the aid of lead lotions and a week’s rest, made a good recovery with a whole prepuce, chagrined at his failure, but happy to have escaped immediate pain.[80]
There is not much doubt but that the operation could have been suggested by its, at times, spontaneous performance, a case of which, by Cullerier, and some other additional cases have been mentioned in a former chapter. Cases occur at times, also, wherein the person having a previously normal and uninterfering prepuce has, through either herpetic inflammations or through impure connection, spurious gonorrhœa, or the use of some venereal-disease preventing-wash after connection, produced some irritation resulting in the abnormal thickening of the inner fold, or an interstitial deposit at the junction of the skin and mucous membrane, with consequent constriction, this deposit finally forming a hard, inelastic ring, which prevented a free exposure of the glans and interfered in sexual connection. In such cases,—like in stricture of the meatus,—any mechanical interference short of cutting with a knife only aggravates the existing difficulty, and it is not uncommon to have such cases apply for assistance after they have in vain tried to dilate the constricting preputial orifice. In the early writings of the Greeks, it is mentioned that among the Egyptians circumcision exempted them from a certain form of disease that affected the penis. Philon mentions particularly the immunity that the operation conferred against a species of affection which Michel Levy asserts to have been a gangrenous disease. So that, outside of any religious significance, there is no doubt that, in individual cases, circumcision has more than once been suggested, although it cannot be said that such individual cases would ever, or could, lead to its becoming a national or racial, much less a sectarian, rite.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Prepuce as an Outlaw, and its Effects on the Glans.
Ricord has well termed this appendage to civilized man “a useless bit of flesh.” Times were, however, when—man living in a wild state, and when in imitation of some of our near relatives with tails and hairy bodies; when he still found locomotion on all-fours handier than on his two feet; when in pursuit of either the juicy grasshopper or other small game, or of the female of his own species to gratify his lust, or in the frantic rush to escape the clutches, fangs, or claws of a pursuing enemy, he was obliged to fly and leap over thorny briars and bramble-bushes or hornets’ nests, or plunge through swamps alive with blood-sucking insects and leeches—Ricord’s definition would certainly have been inapplicable. 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 improvement in man’s condition and his gradual evolution into a higher sphere, the assumption of the erect posture, and the great stride in civilization that originated the invention of the manufacture of the perineal band, which not only protected the glans in its thorny passage through life, but also acted like a protecting ægis to the scrotum and its contents, the prepuce became a superfluity; not only a superfluity, but, now that its natural office had been replaced by the perineal cloth, it actually began to be a nuisance, as its former free contact with the air had retained it in a state of vigorous and disease-resisting health which was now fast departing. As Montesquieu observes, in the causes that led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, those seasons of trials, tribulations, and struggle for existence are those of health and progress and healthy life, and the periods of luxury and idleness are those of degeneracy and decay. 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. Like Belshazzar in his great banquet-hall in ancient Babylon, the prepuce might have read the hand-writing on the wall, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,” and foreseen the gory end that awaited it. Like to other human affairs, however, even in his fallen estate a kind word can be said for the prepuce. Puzey, of Liverpool, has found it of extreme value, and even unequaled by any other part of the body, for furnishing skin-grafts,[81] these grafts showing a vitality that is simply phenomenal, considering the laxity of its tissues and its seemingly adipose character. There is no doubt, however, that for skin-transplanting there is nothing superior to the plants offered by the prepuce of a boy, and where any large surface is to be covered this should undoubtedly be chosen, as offering the greatest and quickest success and the least chances of failure. This is really the only disadvantage that can be charged against circumcision, as in a strictly circumcised community they would be debarred from this great advantage. An uncircumcised individual could be procured, however, to supply the deficiency. It is related that in the latter part of 1890, a Knight Templar, in Cincinnati, required a great supply of grafts or skin-plants to cover a largely-denuded surface, and that the whole of his Commandery chivalrously and generously supplied the needed skin-plants in a body. A few healthy prepuces would have been more efficacious. In advising the use of the prepuce for these purposes it must not be overlooked that in case of a white man it would not do to use skin of any other color besides his own. We have no data to base any assertion as to the relative action of skin-grafts taken from Mongolians or Indians, but we have very reliable data in relation to the proliferating action of those of the negro,[82] which induces a growth of epidermis of its own kind; so that preputial grafts from the negro, combining the extra vitality and proliferation of the preputial tissue with the strong animal vitality of the negro, if applied to a white man, might not produce the most desirable cosmetic effects, especially if on one side of the countenance.
But, taken as a whole, when considered in its relation to onanism, nocturnal enuresis, preputial calculus, syphilis, cancer, and a lot of nervous and other ailments, or induced abnormal physical conditions, we can really conclude that the days of the prepuce are past and gone, that it has outlived its usefulness, and that those whom a religious or civil ordinance or custom happily makes them rid of it are people to be greatly envied. As Sancho Panza remarked, “God bless the man who invented sleep,” so we may well join in blessing the inventor of circumcision, as an event that has saved some parts of the human family from much ill and suffering.