[Hugh7]

I have no idea where sera gets the idea that I have ever claimed to be an anthropologist. (She doesn't seem to understand about crossposting in newsgroups - which are all open to the public anyway.)

I have no idea who the Hugh Young who wrote to BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology about pregnant women with syphilis is. There's a Hugh Young in Singapore who gets in the news a lot for financial advice. Am I him too? (At least sera didn't have to be told - but thought it worth mentioning - that I'm not a professor of urology who died in 1945!)

I have no idea what all her links are supposed to be getting at. John Geishecker is an attorney in Seattle who is kept at work full-time just on botched circumcision cases. Doesn't that tell you something? He is also acting for the mother in the case of a man who wants to circumcise his son, now 13, to spite her. (That certainly does raise the question, if as sera claims, parents are free to cut parts off their children, when does that freedom end? 13? 18? 25? And why then and not a day, a week, a month, years earlier?)

If someone posts a question about circumcision in a public forum, like this one, anyone is allowed to answer. Nobody has to be a doctor. Nobody is pretending to be a doctor.

When sera studied medicine, they failed to teach her about science. Science is not about the last word being handed down from on high by some Authority, it is about the free exchange of ideas. It is the ideas that matter, not the people who express them, nor the letters after their names. There is much about the foreskin and circumcision we don't yet know. These will be found out by science, and by the free exchange of ideas, not by dogmas delivered in mocking tones.

At the same time, science (like medicine) is a human endeavour, subject to human biases and frailties, and if you are a circumcised man in a circumcising society, there is a danger that your study of circumcision will be distorted by those two facts. That is one reason I read studies out of the US supporting circumcision with a skeptical eye.

(Sera's NHS link uses the wonderful expresssion "redundant foreskin". This "diagnosis" has no definition in medicine and no symptoms, it just means "more foreskin than someone - usually a circumcised doctor - is comfortable with".)