Newborn boys in North America may have a Winnipeg doctor to thank for growing up to be natural men.

That’s the nickname for men who survive their infancy with foreskins intact – avoiding the encounter with a scalpel that their fathers suffered.

Dr. John Taylor, a pathologist at Health Sciences Centre, has identified vital functions for the foreskin, which is usually dismissed as a useless flap of flesh.

“There’s nothing like it anywhere else on the body,” Taylor said recently, after the medical world was introduced to his work.

It’s the first new finding about the human anatomy – in this case the foreskin – since two Italian anatomists theorized back in 1450 that the foreskin both protects the penis from damage and heightens sexual pleasure.

It does, on both counts.

Taylor’s research over eight years confirmed that often-dismissed medieval theory by identifying thousands of nerve endings in the foreskin which are stimulated during sex.

Nerve endings

“You can almost see these nerve endings with the naked eye, lined up along the top ridge. They’re the size of a pin.” Taylor said.

His research on the foreskin – the prepuce, specialized mucosa of the penis and its loss to circumcision – in the British Journal of Urology caused a flurry in the United States where the circumcision rate approaches 90 per cent in some states.

One doctor in ultra-conservative Utah, for instance, confided to a researcher whose organization opposes routine circumcision that he recommends it.

It turns out that the practice of retracting the foreskin to clean the penis makes some mothers feel they are masturbating their babies.

It’s easier for Utah women to have their boys circumcised instead, said the researcher, Steve Scott, who is the national education co-ordinator for NOCIRC – the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centres.

“American men who have been circumcised don’t know what they are missing,” said Scott.

What they are missing

“Now Taylor has identified what it is they are missing when you obliterate the ridged mucosa (the inner lining of the foreskin) where all those tactile nerve endings are found,” he observed.

In addition to stimulating sexual pleasure for both the man and his partner, the foreskin protects the male organ from drying out, hardening or even developing callouses.

“The foreskin is nature’s way of protecting the glans (head) of the penis,” Scott said.

In Canada, where the rate of circumcision in 1970 was 40 per cent compared to 69 per cent to 97 per cent in parts of the United States, the Canadian Pediatric Society has revisited its policy on the issue several times in the last generation.

Each time, including the latest review this year, the society has recommended against routine circumcision.

Rates of urinary tract infections, sexually transmitted diseases and penile cancer, while higher in uncircumcised men, are not high enough to recommend circumcision as a way of preventing them, according to pediatric society guidelines in the March 15 edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Circumcision rates have steadily declined in Canada over the past 25 years. In Manitoba, which along with Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia remain the only provinces were newborn circumcision is covered by medicare, 2,832 boys out of a total of about 8,000 born were circumcised last year. That’s a rate of a little more than 30 per cent.

Manitoba pays $19.50 for the procedure if it is performed before the baby is sent home from the hospital. After that, public health insurance will pay only if the circumcision is medically necessary, at a rate of $68.20.

In San Anselmo, Calif., where NOCIRC president Marilyn Milos calls infant circumcision a form of genital mutilation, Taylor’s research has found a welcome home.

Milos hopes Taylor’s work will reverse the course of circumcision in the United States.

“This is so significant because every 26 seconds a baby is strapped down without anesthetic and part of his penis is cut off and thrown in the waste can,” Milos said.

“We don’t need Taylor’s research to prove that circumcision is genital mutilation, but what his work does is to say what the importance of that tissue is,” Milos said.

Milos said the average circumcision cuts off two to three centimetres of rich vascular tissue which contains 240 feet of nerves and 1,000 nerve endings.

It’s that specialized function of the foreskin which Taylor cites in defending the Jewish religious practice of circumcision.

“With gentiles, circumcision is seen as trivial. But for Jews, it is a serious business, a sacrifice that is 4,000 years old,” Taylor said.

In other words, for Taylor the religious practice accords the foreskin the respect it rightly deserves.

It’s routine circumcision that Taylor opposes.

No excuse for doctors

“There’s no excuse now for doctors who do it,” Taylor stated categorically.

“It’s much more severe that doctors and nurses would have you believe if they’re trying to placate a patient. And it’s not only taking away prepuce (foreskin), but invariably some of the skin from the shaft of the penis as well,” Taylor observed.

In the United States, organizations have sprung up to represent the interests of men who oppose circumcision.

Partly as a result of those political efforts, medical science has discovered surgical and non-surgical ways of repairing what Penthouse magazine in its August issue calls “the unkindest cut of all.”

In one technique described by the men’s magazine, the remnants of the foreskin are stretched back over the circumcised penis through a variety of means, including surgical tape, weights and even suspenders.

It quotes the inventor of the technique, a man identified only as D. Evans, describing the results: “The difference for me is that each stroke during sex is as intense as the orgasm was (before the procedure).”

But, Evans told Penthouse, the process can take up to a year to complete and be the source of acute embarrassment, especially at airports, where metal detectors sound alarms over the metal retro-fittings.

There are other ways.

Christin O’Hara, the pseudonym of a former Massachusetts teacher who is writing a book about the sexual advantages of natural men, concludes the benefits extend beyond the bedroom.

Good sex isn’t the sole determining factor for a good marriage but it gives it a leg up, she said.

O’Hara’s husband had a $12,000 (US) operation to restore a facsimile of a foreskin which involved a scrotal implant, she said.

“My husband says that circumcised sex was a two on a scale of one to 10. Now he says it’s a 10.”

One final note – Taylor began his research 14 years ago with the birth of his first grandson, whose mother, Taylor’s daughter, was advised by her obstetrician to consider circumcision.

Originally from the United Kingdom where circumcision is uncommon, Taylor and his wife Margaret were initially appalled and later horrified by the procedure.

The result? Taylor’s grandson, and three others born since, were left intact to grow up as natural men.

Flesh similar to palms, eyelids

The Medical text Gray’s Anatomy describes the foreskin as “the skin covering the penis; remarkable for its thinness, its dark colour and its looseness of connection with the fascial sheath of the organ.”

“People talk about gonads and genitals as if they know all about them. They don’t,” says Dr. John Taylor, whose research has uncovered unique nervous functions for that loose flap of skin.

Here are some facts:

The flesh of the foreskin is like the hood of the female clitoris in function and anatomy. Both are comparable to the sensitive tissue of eyelids, inner lining of the lips and palms of the hands.

The ridged lining of the foreskin develops its specialized nerve endings after puberty. Generally the foreskin itself is attached by a membrane to the penile shaft until about age three. Doctors now advise parents against retracting the foreskin to clean the penis.

The procedure is done without anesthetic deliberately. “The pain expressed in circumcision should be associated with the (masturbation) habit we wish to eradicate,” one 19th-century doctor (a man) was quoted as saying.

Circumcised men must use longer strokes than uncircumcised men because of the loss of sensation related to the absence of a foreskin. Some anti-circumcision activists wonder if circumcision is related to impotence problems later in life. Doctors now say that during intercourse, a foreskin increases pleasure to the male and decreases abrasion and loss of fluid to the female.

A recent University of Washington study found that 47 out of 114 men with penile cancer were circumcised. Poor hygiene and a history of sexually transmitted disease are now believed to be more important factors for penile cancer.

Uncircumcised infants have a 12-fold increase in urinary tract infections. The overall rate of such infections is one per cent to two per cent, the Canadian Pediatric Society states.

For further reading try: The Joy of Uncircumcising by Jim Bigelow.