The Cannibal Defense
How smart will we look in a hundred years or so. If I write a book about some subject near and dear to my heart, will it still hold up after a hundred years? How much of my personal bias will be on display? How much will seem odd and out of place? I'm currently reading "History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present" by Peter Charles Remondino (published 1891). The subtitle begins: "Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance ..." The book is also identified as No. 11 in the physicians and students ready reference series. So, here is a book aimed at delivering science (medical information) along with philosophical considerations. That already marks the text as out of sync with current trends. We like to keep science in one corner and philosophy in another, although I think each has to inform the other. Science without philosophy (ethics) or philosophy without science (practical application of the real world) easily leads to harm.
Although the title highlights circumcision, a better name would probably be: "Everything you ever wanted to know about genital modification or mutation, but were afraid to ask." The text provides not only information about circumcision, but also infibulation (use of rings, clasps or stitches in girls or boys to prevent intercourse), muzzling (various chastity devices), castration (removal of the testicles) emasculation (removal of the entire organ),hermaphrodism (double gender) and hypospadias (anomaly in the opening of the urethral canal).
On the philosophical side, the text covers miracles (increased fertility from contact with the circumcised foreskin of Jesus), Eunuchism (should boys be castrated or emasculated for specific work as harem keepers or soprano singers), and a section disputing the contention that physicians were by default, atheists. You won't find this kind of information in a medical text today!
But let's get down to the nitty gritty. Is the information still valid? I'll let you decide. The author takes a firm stand against one of the traditional aspects of circumcision called "suction". Suction is a part of the Jewish custom in which the circumcisor sucks the blood off the just circumcised flesh and it is supposed to impart health. The author thinks this as a problem, but this was before the germ theory was widely accepted as true. Instead, the author is more concerned about the haemostatic quality (ability to stop bleeding)of this practice. His concern is that suction may have worked well in the past, but modern man's secretions were now vitiated (corrupted). I'll let him give you the good news himself:
Man, living in the open air of Armenia, Palestine, or Arabia, sleeping in the open tents of our Biblical forefathers, living on the simple diet of a shepherd's camp, with the abstemiousness that those climates naturally induce in man, could not help but be healthy. In those early days, when neither passion, anxiety, nor worry disturbed either digestion or sleep, man had no vitiated secretions, wine was then a rarity, and water was the drink. One of the early patriarchs on such diet would have furnished a dainty and savory dish to the most fastidious cannibal, who is now tormented by the Komerborg Kawan, this being a term used by the Australian cannibals to designate the peculiar nausea that is induced in them when they recklessly eat of white man, --something which they do not experience from feasting on the savages who live on the simple diet of a pastoral tribe.
Okay, now go pick up a current book and see if you can identify anything that will smack of the "Cannibal Defense" in a hundred years or so. Come on, I dare you!