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Previous Volume 354:310-312 January 19, 2006 Number 3 Next

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Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America
By Leonard B. Glick. 370 pp. New York, Oxford University Press, 2005. $30. ISBN 0-19-517674-X.

A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain
By Robert Darby. 374 pp. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005. $35. ISBN 0-226-13645-0.

Circumcision tends to provoke controversy, which is not surprising when one considers that circumcision invokes religion, medicine, and sex. The ritual cutting of the foreskin is a practice older than recorded history; a famous Egyptian bas-relief shows that circumcision was well established by 2400 b.c. Yet no one knows where or how the practice originated or even what its meaning was in ancient Egypt. Later, for reasons scarcely understood, circumcision became central to Judaism and Islam. Then, in a fascinating intellectual and cultural transformation, beginning in the late 19th . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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