The Bible and the Immune System
The Bible and the Immune System
The Bible and the Immune Sysytem
The Bible instructs that male babies are to be circumcised on the eighth day (Genesis 17:12). Medical science has now discovered that this is the day that the coagulating factor in the blood, called prothrombin, is the highest. It reaches its peak on the eighth day, then drops. Medical science has also discovered that this is when the human body’s immune system is at its peak.
According to Dr. Armand J. Quick, author of several works on the control of bleeding, it was recognized as early as 1894 that the newborn infant tended to bleed easily in the first few days of life. This was later confirmed when researchers gained the ability to accurately measure prothrombin in the blood.
Prothrombin levels are normal at birth, drop to very low levels in the next few days, and return to normal at the end of the first week. Another study showed that by the eighth day prothrombin levels reach 110% of normal… In the words of Dr. Quick, “It hardly seems accidental that the rite of circumcision was postponed until the eighth day by the Mosaic law.”
For years, circumcision has been known to offer virtually complete protection from penile cancer. According to a recent review article in the New England Journal of Medicine, none of the over 1600 persons studied with this cancer had been circumcised in infancy. In the words of Cochen and McCurdy, the incidence of penile cancer in the U.S. is “essentially zero” among circumcised men.
In addition, circumcision protects against bacterial, fungal, and parasitic infections and a variety of other conditions related to hygiene. The extremely low rate of cervical cancer in Jewish women (nine to 22 times less than among non-Jewish women) is thought to be related to the practice of circumcision.
Beginning in the early 1980s, several studies reported that circumcised boys were between 10 and 39 times less likely to develop urinary tract infections during infancy than uncircumcised boys.
As a result of studies like these, a number of prestigious medical organizations in the U.S. are beginning to recognize the benefits of circumcision on public health. The California Medical Association recently endorsed circumcision as an “effective public health measure.” (Resolution March 1988)
