Clitoridectomy means the partial or total removal of the external part of the clitoris. It was sometimes practiced in English-speaking nations well after the first half of the Twentieth Century, ostensibly to stop masturbation. [12]. Blue Cross Blue Shield paid for clitoridectomies in the U.S.A. until May 18, 1977 [13]. Clitoridectomy is still being practiced in isolated instances. It is, however, quite common in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa, east-Africa, Egypt, Sudan, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Type II circumcision is more extensive than type I, meaning clitoridectomy and sometimes also removal of the labia minora.
Neurectomy, or severing of the pubic nerve to permanently numb the genitals and approximate the effect of a clitoridectomy was performed on institutionalized girls and women around the turn of the 20th Century in America and Australia, and electrical cauterization of the clitoris was reported to have been occasionally performed on mental patients in the USA to stop them from masturbating as recently as 1950.
The kind of things that sometimes happened to girls and women were documented in Alex Comfort's book, "The Anxiety Makers", Panther Edition, London, 1968:
About 1858, Dr Isaac Baker Brown, later president of the Medical Society of London, introduced the operation of clitoridectomy for the consequences of what he coyly calls 'peripheral excitement'. These, in his view, included epilepsy, hysteria and the convulsive disorders generally (page 109). In 1866 Brown published a series of 48 of such cases. This caused what Comfort called an 'almighty row'. Dr Baker Brown was ejected from the Obstetrical Society. Comfort says (page 111) that 'clitoridectomy fortunately disappeared from England'. However, it was taken up in the United States:
In 1894, we find Dr. Eyer of the St. John's Hospital, Ohio, dealing with nervousness and masturbation in a little girl by cauterizing the clitoris; this failing, a surgeon was called in to bury it with silver wire sutures - which the child tore and resumed the habit. The entire organ was then excised, with the crura. Six weeks after the operation the patient is reported as saying, 'You know there is nothing there now, so I could do nothing.' (Comfort, ibid, page 111)
Comfort says that this concern about masturbation 'did not really die out completely until the 1940s with the statistical studies of Kinsey' (Comfort, ibid, page 119)
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