Theos-Talk Archives (March 2006 Message tt00885)

Faking science and treating billions of humans like non-persons is 
exemplified in the work of the American Medical Association under 
the direction of Dr. Lewis Sayre, who claimed to heal orthopedic 
problems, epilepsy, hernias and lunacy with circumcision.  America 
is the only industrialized nation in the world that continues to 
widely practice circumcision, despite evidence that it has no 
medical value.  The U.S. Navy will no longer pay for circumcisions 
because of its lack of medical benefit.  Yet Dr. Sayre, President of 
the American Medical Association, faked medical evidence that has 
never been replicated.  

Based on an age of 60-75 years, Bart has a 55-60% chance of being 
circumcised.  By 1971, 90% of American males were circumcised.  When 
the American Pediatric Association stated against circumcision in 
the 1970's, pediatricians put so much pressure on the APA that it 
was forced to restate its position.  Pediatricians make plenty of 
money on circumcisions.  

The pain caused to infant boys, disfiguring them for a lifetime with 
no medical benefit, is brutal and exemplifies the term "vandal 
spirit" that Judge used.  The main difference between faking 
scientific evidence in American and the Soviet Union is the 
political machinery used to accomplish it.  

Accounts of medical disorders that Dr. Sayre claimed to have cured 
with circumcision are quoted at the below link.  The popularity 
circumcision gained among American physicians who claimed miracle 
cures using circumcision, was nothing but faked science.  

To see Dr. Sayre's faked evidence, go to the following link:

http://www.cirp.org/library/history/gollaher/

He was a born organizer: the prime mover in the New York 
Pathological Society; an officer of the New York Academy of 
Medicine; and in 1866 vice president of the fledgling American 
Medical Association (AMA). In honor of his indefatigable striving on 
behalf of their profession, in 1880 the medical elite elected Lewis 
Sayre president of the AMA. Among his lasting professional 
contributions was Sayre's push to upgrade the organization's 
published transactions, which he christened the Journal of the 
American Medical Association. [9]

For the better part of three decades, until his death in 1900, he 
continued zealously to promote circumcision, discovering an 
amazingly wide array of benefits connected with the operation. Not 
only orthopedic problems, but epilepsy, hernia, and even lunacy 
appeared to respond. In 1875 he issued a pamphlet, Spinal Anemia 
with Partial Paralysis and Want of Co-operation from Irritation of 
the Genital Organs, in which he proposed that "peripheral 
irritation" from the foreskin could produce "an insanity of the 
muscles," the muscles acting "on their own account, involuntarily... 
without the controlling power of the person's brain." [10]

To prove this point, he recounted the case of an eighteen-month-old 
boy who was to all appearances "like a lunatic, an insane child," 
crying constantly, sleeping only when dosed with laudanum or 
morphine. The result of circumcising him was, Sayre boasted, "almost 
a miracle; it is beyond the power of man to comprehend it unless you 
see these cases from the start." Hoping that he had found a cure for 
certain forms of mental disorder - the most elusive of illnesses - 
Sayre made several expeditions to the Manhattan State Hospital's 
Idiot Asylum on Randall's Island where he "carefully examined the 
external genitals of sixty-seven children, operating on a number of 
them." Afterward he was convinced that some boys' mental symptoms 
improved, but his surgical experiment ended in frustration. No 
patient recovered enough to be discharged from the asylum. [11]

Occasional setbacks did not dampen Sayre's enthusiasm though. It is 
a measure of the signal importance he attached to this work that, as 
AMA delegate to the great 1876 International Medical Congress in 
Philadelphia he supplemented his brilliant demonstration of hip-
joint excision (of which Joseph Lister exclaimed that "this 
demonstration would of itself have been a sufficient reward for my 
voyage across the Atlantic") by delivering a long paper "On the 
Deleterious Results of a Narrow Prepuce and Preputial Adhesion." [12]
Sayre developed his argument for circumcision during a period of 
dauntless surgical experimentation on the genitalia of both sexes. 
Reflex neurosis - the theory that there was an intricate web of 
nervous affinity running through the spine to every organ of the 
body and that, in turn, each organ had its own sphere of influence 
on physical and mental health - was the technical concept behind the 
vogue of sexual surgery. This idea rested on a theory 
of "irritation" whose roots lay in the eighteenth century: a 
mechanistic view of the body, and especially the nervous system, 
which attributed many diseases to pathological agitation of tissues 
and, later, of cells. Taking the theory to its extreme, Rudolf 
Virchow, the father of cell biology, suggested that irritation was 
the hidden cause of malignant growth of cells. At bottom, doctors 
found theories of irritation and reflex neurosis appealing because 
they suggested that inexplicable mental disorders and other baffling 
syndromes like neurasthenia had a discrete somatic basis. This 
opened up therapeutic possibilities. If irritation could be traced 
to its source, presumably it could also be eradicated. [13]
Inspired by reflex theory, beginning in the early 1870s American 
gynecologists, led by James Marion Sims, invented scores of new 
genital surgeries intended to alleviate psychological symptoms. 
Cutting the body to cure the mind could lead to frightening 
practices. Robert Battey, a young Georgia surgeon, for instance, 
lent his name to the so-called "normal ovariotomy." With no apparent 
misgivings, he removed women's healthy ovaries to relieve symptoms 
ranging from hysteria and neurasthenia to backache. Accepted on both 
sides of the Atlantic, Battey's operation was especially popular in 
America where, according to one scholar, it "was not a marginal 
procedure conducted by a handful of crackpots, but central in the 
arsenal of late-nineteenth-century gynecology." [14] Other doctors 
(including Sayre himself) revived the mutilating procedure of 
clitoridectomy, with the clitoris subjected to a variety of 
surgeries, manipulations, and chemical preparations. These practices 
were sustained in America long after they had fallen out of favor in 
Europe. [15]

On the level of theory, reflex neurosis applied both to males and 
females. Both sexes were thought to be subject to organic 
disturbances, including pelvic or genital irritations, which might 
portend dire consequences for body and mind. But in practice, 
surgery in males to suppress sexual function was comparatively rare. 
While it seemed permissible for male surgeons to use the scalpel 
heroically on women's pelvic organs, undeterred by the prospect 
of "unsexing" their patients, few performed castration unless they 
confirmed symptoms of life-threatening disease. Even if they had 
tried to expand sexual surgery on males, there is no reason to 
suppose that physicians could have overridden men's objections. 
Clearly, in an age prone to denigrate female sexuality, they found 
women more pliable when it came to the dictates of medical authority.
What is notable in retrospect, though, is that while female sexual 
surgery gradually declined, male circumcision eventually became 
standard practice. Moreover, procedures like clitoridectomy 
and "normal ovariotomy," even in the days of their greatest 
acceptance, were performed on a small minority of American women. 

Yet circumcision, quietly democratized in the last decade of the 
nineteenth century, was subsequently extended to a majority of the 
male population. The operation's first medical advocates were 
physicians who followed the logic and example of Lewis Sayre; but 
these men were succeeded by others who insisted that performing the 
surgery was salubrious and appropriate even on patients who 
exhibited no symptoms of disease.
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Why is the most "advanced" nation in the industrialized world alone 
in practicing a disturbing archaism from less enlightened times? 
In "The Saharasian Connection," Dr. James DeMeo, who calls 
circumcision "an ancient blood ritual ... that has absolutely 
nothing whatsoever to do with medicine, health, or science in 
practically all cases," puts forth this hypothesis: "The fact that 
so many circumcised American men, and mothers, nurses, and 
obstetricians are ready to defend the practice in the face of 
contrary epidemiological evidence is a certain giveaway to hidden, 
unconscious motives and disturbed emotional feelings about the penis 
and sexual matters in general."