Edwin Hartley Pratt

He originated the briefly popular practice of "orificial surgery", which sought to cure a variety of physical and psychological ills by surgical corrections to the various orifices of the body.

Pratt served for 20 years as attending surgeon for Cook County Hospital,[1] and also founded his own institute, the Lincoln Park Sanitarium.

[2] In 1852, they moved to northwestern Illinois; in his boyhood, Pratt attended the district school in Rock Creek Township.

At the time, the college was strongly identified with anti-Masonic beliefs, and forbade all students from joining secret societies.

[2] Upon graduation he was invited to join the faculty as an adjunct professor, and did so after an additional term of study at Jefferson Medical College and "Keene's School of Anatomy" in Philadelphia.

The Sanitarium occupied a five-story structure of Bedford limestone at the intersection of Lake View and Deming, overlooking Chicago's Lincoln Park.

[4] He closed the Lincoln Park Sanitarium in 1895 to open the "Pratt Sanatorium", which was a smaller operation located in a two-story building[7] on west Diversey Avenue in Chicago.

[8] Pratt described his reason for closing the Lincoln Park Sanitarium as "purely a financial one", prompted by falling numbers of patients in the aftermath of the Panic of 1893.

He was a particularly strong advocate of circumcision as a cure for rape, opining that if only rapists "had received the proper orificial attention earlier in their lives their criminal career would undoubtedly have been prevented.

[18] To the extent that Pratt and his ideas are remembered at all in the present day, it is for their connection to debates on circumcision and female genital mutilation.

Pratt's ideas are sometimes cited as evidence of the fallacious historical basis for male circumcision,[19] and particularly its connection with the desire to prevent masturbation.