Clitoridectomy
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"The clitoris, fatal organ of the daughters of Eve is responsible for all temptations. This is where nature has placed the throne of her pleasures and delights, as it did in the glans of man. This is where Mother Nature has placed her excessive itching. It is a superfluous organ, unnecessary for reproduction, and in some cases its removal is necessary to prevent serious pathologies that may arise from its continuous excitation [...] It is therefore not necessary; even unwise, to introduce girls to personal hygiene, at the risk of them engaging in investigations that lead seeking impure pleasures. Do young girls and women really need this type of hygiene, there where it is futile and dangerous to linger? [...] Which keeper of the conscience would accept such intimate toilet [...] this sin against decency?" -- Tableau de l'amour conjugal (1686), Nicolas Venette, tr. JW Geerinck |
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Clitoridectomy is the surgical removal of the clitoris. It is rarely needed as a therapeutic medical procedure, such as when cancer has developed in or spread to the clitoris. Most removals of the clitoris probably occur as female genital cutting, defined by the World Health Organisation as "all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural, religious or other non-therapeutic reasons.".
In France, clitoridectomy was recommended at the end of the 19th century by physicians such as Thésée Pouillet (1849-1923), Pierre Garnier (1819–1901) and Paul Broca (1824-1880) in order to combat female masturbation. The same had been done by Nicolas Venette.
The first reported clitoridectomy in the West was carried out in 1822 by a surgeon in Berlin, a Dr. Graefe, on a teenage girl regarded as an "imbecile" who was masturbating frequently.
Isaac Baker Brown (1812–1873), an English gynaecologist who was president of the Medical Society of London in 1865, believed that the "unnatural irritation" of the clitoris caused epilepsy, hysteria, and mania, and he worked "to remove [it] whenever he had the opportunity of doing so", according to his obituary in the Medical Times and Gazette. Peter Lewis Allen writes that Brown's views caused outrage, and he died penniless after being expelled from the Obstetrical Society.
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