>>
The practice's origins are unknown, but its east-west, north-south distribution in Africa meets in Sudan. Gerry Mackie has suggested that infibulation began there with the
Meroite civilization (c.
800 BCE – c. 350 CE), before the rise of Islam, to increase confidence in paternity.
[144][145]
...... The Greek geographer
Strabo (c. 64 BCE – c. 23 CE) wrote about FGM after visiting Egypt around
25 BCE: "This is one of the customs most zealously pursued by them [the Egyptians]: to raise every child that is born and to circumcise [
peritemnein] the males and excise [
ektemnein] the females ..."
[149][t] Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE) also made reference to it: "the Egyptians by the custom of their country circumcise the marriageable youth and maid in the fourteenth (year) of their age, when the male begins to get seed, and the female to have a menstrual flow."
[152] It is mentioned briefly in a work attributed to the Greek physician
Galen (129 – c. 200 CE): "When [the clitoris] sticks out to a great extent in their young women, Egyptians consider it appropriate to cut it out."
[v] ----
from Wiki, where it's been sitting readily available the whole time for those genuinely interested in factual history rather than mythology
>> Gynaecologists in 19th-century
Europe and the United States removed the clitoris to treat insanity and masturbation.
[158] A British doctor, Robert Thomas, suggested clitoridectomy as a cure for
nymphomania in 1813.
[159][160] The first reported clitoridectomy in the West, described in
The Lancet in 1825, was performed in 1822 in Berlin by
Karl Ferdinand von Graefe on a 15-year-old girl who was masturbating excessively.
[159][161]
Isaac Baker Brown, an English gynaecologist, president of the
Medical Society of London and co-founder in 1845 of
St. Mary's Hospital, believed that masturbation, or "unnatural irritation" of the clitoris, caused
hysteria, spinal irritation, fits, idiocy, mania and death.
[161][162] He therefore "set to work t
o remove the clitoris whenever he had the opportunity of doing so", according to his obituary.
[163] Brown performed several clitoridectomies between 1859 and 1866.
[162] In the United States,
J. Marion Sims followed Brown's work and in 1862 slit the
neck of a woman's uterus and amputated her clitoris, "for the relief of the nervous or hysterical condition as recommended by Baker Brown".
[164] When Brown published his views in
On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females (1866), doctors in London accused him of quackery and expelled him from the
Obstetrical Society.
[165][162][166]
Later in the 19th century, A. J. Bloch, a surgeon in New Orleans, removed the clitoris of a two-year-old girl who was reportedly masturbating.
[167] According to a 1985 paper in the
Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey, clitoridectomy was performed in the United States
into the 1960s to treat hysteria, erotomania and lesbianism.[168][169] From the mid-1950s,
James Burt, a gynaecologist in Dayton, Ohio, performed non-standard repairs of
episiotomies after childbirth, adding more stitches
to make the vaginal opening smaller. From 1966 until 1989, he performed "love surgery" by cutting women's
pubococcygeus muscle, repositioning the vagina and urethra, and removing the clitoral hood, thereby making their genital area more appropriate, in his view, for intercourse in the
missionary position.
[170] "Women are structurally inadequate for intercourse," he wrote; he said he would turn them into "horny little mice".
[171] In the 1960s and 1970s he performed these procedures without consent while repairing episiotomies and performing hysterectomies and other surgery; he said he had performed a variation of them on 4,000 women by 1975.
[170] Following complaints, he was required in 1989 to stop practicing medicine in the United States.
[172] (ibid)
There it is again ---- it's all about controlling women by those with horrifying fear of female sexuality. Ain't nuttin' "religious" in there.