Robert Darby. A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 374. $35.00

Robert Darby takes on the difficult task of writing a history of the body (or in this case a body part) that avoids the lure of discourse analysis and “mere representation” (p. 9) and pays attention to the body itself, focusing on the tangible, material, and corporeal. Darby's subject is the penis, and his purpose is to understand why circumcision became a widely accepted medical practice in modern Britain.

His central argument is that the rise of circumcision as a standard practice in modern Britain was the outcome of several factors, the most important being the masturbation panic of the early nineteenth century, the medical movement toward prevention of disease by sanitary and surgical means, and the importance of nerve force theory. He argues that circumcision arose in the nineteenth century as a preventive health measure, to control a...