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Fact check: What are the historical origins of circumcision as a practice to prevent masturbation?
Executive Summary
The claim that circumcision originated as a practice to prevent masturbation traces clearly to the late nineteenth-century anglophone medical world, where surgeons and physicians promoted circumcision as a remedy for what they called spermatorrhea and as a deterrent to masturbation; this is well documented in historical scholarship [1] [2]. At the same time, longstanding religious and cultural traditions that practiced circumcision for millennia had different motives—ritual, hygienic, or social—which means the association between circumcision and anti-masturbation ideology is a later, historically specific development rather than a universal origin [3] [4].
1. How a Victorian medical panic reshaped a surgical practice
Historical research identifies a cluster of nineteenth-century medical arguments that linked male masturbation with a range of physical and mental maladies, coalescing in a diagnosis sometimes called spermatorrhea; influential clinicians proposed circumcision as a preventive surgical intervention to reduce sexual stimulation and thus prevent masturbation. Scholarship shows these ideas spread primarily in Britain and the United States during the late 1800s, when social hygiene movements and anxieties about degeneration and moral order amplified calls for routine male circumcision [2] [1] [5]. The argument was medicalized: removing the foreskin was framed as a therapeutic measure against a perceived pathological behavior [1].
2. Scholarly consensus: nineteenth-century medicalization, not ancient origin
Recent and retrospective historiography converges on the conclusion that the explicit framing of circumcision as a tool to prevent masturbation is a modern, nineteenth-century phenomenon rather than an ancient origin story. Review articles and monographs emphasize the complexity of motives across eras—religious rites, cultural identity, and ritual purity dominated in ancient societies, while the link to masturbation emerges when Western medicine began pathologizing juvenile and adult sexual practices [6] [5] [3]. This consensus is grounded in archival medical literature and histories of public health debates from the period in question [1].
3. Competing explanations: hygiene, religion, and medical myths
A second strand of scholarship challenges simplified narratives that reduce circumcision’s history to hygiene claims or single motives, labeling the “hygiene” origin story as a medical urban myth. Researchers remind readers that circumcision’s long global history includes rituals in ancient Egypt and Judaism with non-medical rationales, and that attributing the practice’s roots to sanitary reform or single-cause explanations overlooks sociocultural diversity and contested historical evidence [4] [7] [3]. These works caution against projecting nineteenth-century Western medical priorities backward onto millennia of heterogeneous practice.
4. Geographic and cultural limits: an anglophone phenomenon, historically specific
Primary historical analyses emphasize that the anti-masturbation rationale for circumcision was geographically and culturally specific, concentrated in the English-speaking medical communities of Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century. The promotion of routine male circumcision in that context reflected particular moral economies and professionalizing impulses within Victorian and post-Victorian medicine, and did not universally displace other local rationales for circumcision practiced elsewhere or earlier [1]. Scholars therefore treat the link between circumcision and masturbation prevention as contingent and time-bound.
5. Divergent source emphases and scholarly debates
The literature displays methodological and interpretive differences: some works foreground the role of specific medical authors and case reports that popularized spermatorrhea theories and circumcision as treatment, while others situate the phenomenon within broader cultural trends like moral hygiene, colonial medicine, and surgical professionalization. Historians disagree on the relative weight of individual clinicians versus structural cultural forces, but all agree the explicit preventative rationale against masturbation is not antique; it crystallized in modern medical discourse [2] [1] [6].
6. What this means for modern claims and public narratives
Understanding the nineteenth-century origins of the anti-masturbation rationale clarifies contemporary debates: claims that circumcision has existed since antiquity for the purpose of preventing masturbation are historically inaccurate. Accurate public discussion requires distinguishing ancient ritual motives from later medical and moral rationales, and acknowledging how medical authority in the nineteenth century repurposed an old procedure for a new, culturally specific fear. Scholarly reviews and historical articles provide the evidentiary basis for this distinction and should guide policy and cultural discussions [5] [4].
7. Bottom line: a layered, time-bound origin story
The strongest, multi-source reading is that circumcision as a practice long predates the masturbation-prevention rationale, but that the specific idea of using circumcision to prevent masturbation emerged in the late 1800s within anglophone medical discourse and became influential in Britain and the U.S. Historical scholarship from 2005 through 2025 consistently supports this view, while cautioning against one-size-fits-all explanations and the persistence of hygiene myths in popular accounts [2] [6] [4].