Abstract
Along the recent medical history there is an ubiquitous myth surrounding smegma; its nature, composition, its beneficial role or deleterious effects either in health or in diseases. Those scientist who want to advocate circumcision are usually dissimulate behind smegma; incriminating it to induce cancer not only in the harbouring man but also in his partner, this normal substance has been causally linked to cervical, prostatic and penile cancers. Any preputial pathology for which a clear aetiology has not been established, the smegma is usually incriminated. On the other hand; those who want to struggle against preputial cut are pretending a sophisticated function of smegma in fighting against infection and they magnifying its role in normal sexual life. Some of circumcision zealots had irrefutable dogma about the smegma, but if smegum is dangerous by its nature we will prove that circumcision will not eliminate it, but only circumcision will just make it invisible.
Even the historical perspective of medical ideas pertaining to smegma is confusing, but over the past two centuries there are many researches investigated the smegma in details and impartially.
The other problem in the previous studies that most of the observations have been extrapolated to the human from other mammals, and this may leads to misinterpretation of the nature and function of smegma.
We will discuss the origin, nature, and role of smegma, and two new points will be elaborated; firstly the genital sites other than the preputial sac have also producing smegma, and secondly smegma itself had no shedding cells or cell desquamations, it is just a genital sebum.
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Fahmy, M.A.B. (2020). Smegma. In: Normal and Abnormal Prepuce. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37621-5_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37621-5_17
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