Circumcision & Cancer

The fact that 85% of the boy babies born in U.S. private hospitals nowadays are circumcised, regardless of the parents' religious beliefs, may be an important factor in reducing cancer of the uterine cervix (neck of the womb) in years to come. Dr. Ernest L. Wynder. of Manhattan's Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases,* has reached this comforting conclusion after studying the striking differences in the incidence of cervical cancer among women with different marital histories.

It all began with the oft-quoted observation that among Jewish women whose husbands have been routinely, ritually circumcised, cervical cancer is only one-tenth to one-fifth as common as among non-Jewish women of similar age and social status. Was this coincidence or what?

To find out, Dr. Wynder arranged exhaustive interviews of 1,900 women in twelve U.S. hospitals scattered over four states; one-third of them had cervical cancer, while the rest (the controls) had other diseases of the pelvis.

The answers ruled out the possibility of coincidence. They also ruled out pregnancy and number of pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages and douches as possible causes of this type of cancer (which, in frequency, is second only to breast cancer among U.S. women, and takes an estimated 14,000 lives a year, despite thousands of operations for removal). Dr. Wynder's key findings:

P: A woman whose husband is uncircumcised runs 2 1/2 times as great a risk of cervical cancer as a woman, married only once, whose husband has been circumcised.

P: A woman married only once, but beginning intercourse at 16, is twice as likely to develop cervical cancer as a woman married between 20 and 24. The likelihood keeps going down as the marriage age goes up.

P: A woman who has two or more marital partners runs a proportionately greater risk of cervical cancer than those married once.

That marriage and sexual relations are not the only elements in cervical cancer was shown by the fact that 1% of the victims had never had intercourse. To test his U.S. findings, Dr. Wynder enlisted the help of physicians in India and found direct confirmation: cervical cancer is far commoner among the wives of uncircumcised Hindus than among those of circumcised Moslems, though their hygienic standards are about the same.

Among men, penile cancer is far rarer than cervical cancer among women, but its occurrence follows the same pattern. Dr. Wynder's deduction: circumcision may be a big help in preventing both, presumably because it facilitates personal cleanliness.

* Formerly of St. Louis' Washington University, where, with famed Surgeon Evarts Graham, he produced cancers on the backs of mice with tobacco tar (TIME, Nov. 30).

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