Actually, they used to remove the clitoris literally in Britain and America, as late as in the 1940s, to cure girls' and women's "emotional disorders."
Take a look at Elizabeth Sheehan, "Victorian Clitoridectomy: Isaac Baker Brown and His Harmless Operative Procedure" (_Medical Anthropology Newsletter_ 12.4, August 1981):
<blockquote>Ironically, during the same period when British anthropology was beginning to catalog the strange behavior of the British Empire's colonized peoples, British gynecological medicine of the mid-nineteenth century was engaging in practices equally strange, certainly at least as "unscientific," and clearly ritual in nature. . . .
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. . . In March 1866 the book, _On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females_ was published, in which [Isaac Baker] Brown proposed that all of the feminine weaknesses referred to in the title could be cured by excision of the clitoris. "All unprejudiced men must adopt, more or less, the practice which I have carried out," he wrote in his book.
Brown's observation that many of the epileptic patients in his Home masturbated led to his conclusion that such a practice was related to the etiology of the disease. In _Curability_, Brown avowed that "peripheral excitement of the branches of the pudic nerve" gave rise to a disease which could be divided into eight distinct stages, beginning with hysteria, developing into epilepsy, and culminating in either idiocy or death. . . .
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. . . [A]nother doctor's account of Brown's operation depicted a procedure of almost unbelievable cruelty.
<blockquote>Two instruments were used; the pair of hooked forceps which Mr. Brown always uses in clitoridectomy, and a cautery iron such as he uses in dividing the pedicle in ovariotomy. . . .The clitoris was seized by the forceps in the usual manner. The thin edge of the red-hot iron was then passed around its base until the organ was severed from its attachment, being partly cut or sawn, and partly torn away. After the clitoris was removed, the nymphae on each side were severed in a similar way by a sawing motion of the hot iron. After the clitoris was removed, the operation was brought to a close by taking the back of the iron and sawing the surfaces of the labia and the other parts of the vulva which had escaped the cautery, and the instrument was rubbed down backwards and forwards till the parts were more effectually destroyed than when Mr. Brown uses the scissors to effect the same result [_British Medical Journal_ 1867: 407-8]</blockquote>
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. . . In 1818 the clitoris was not even mentioned in a textbook description of female reproductive anatomy; by 1866 it was being viewed as the source of several severe but unconnected disorders. . . .
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. . . If any other operation had been shown to have been of such negligible value, it would have been abandoned. Clitoridectomy was practiced in Victorian England in spite of its failure to effect cures for the disorders it was intended to relieve.
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. . . The number of clitoridectomies performed in England during the period when Brown was practicing is impossible to determine. The fact that the operation is described in literature published well after the 1860s lends support to the idea that only Brown's particularly well-publicized application of the procedure was discouraged, while clitoridectomy in and of itself remained an acceptable medical technique. Additionally, widespread belief in the dangers of masturbation to the female sensibility was never disputed in the discussion concerning Brown's use of the operation.
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Evidently it [the fact that The British medical establishment censured and got rid of Brown in 1867] did little to discredit the medical reasoning behind clitoridectomy, particularly in America, where it was recommended in the textbooks of several well-known gynecologists. In his 1859 study, _Woman: Her Diseases and Remedies_, Charles Meigs had proposed the practice of the operation, citing the case of a nine-year-old nymphomaniac (Meigs 1859: 151); but as late as 1897, Thomas Allbutt's _A System of Gynecology_ stated that in cases of nervous disordr thought to be caused by an enlarged clitoris, "it may be necessary to amputate the clitoris, or to excise the nymphae. In a case of my own great benefit folowed the excision of the labia minora in a highly neurotic girl, who was thus restored from a state of chronic invalidism to one of health and usefulness" (Allbutt 1897: 97). The last clitoridectomy known to have been performed in this country to correct emotional disorder was done in the 1940s on a five-year-old girl (Ehrenreich and English [_Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness_, Old Westbury: Feminist Press] 1973: 34).
(Sheehan, pp. 10-12, 15)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
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