Twelve hundred years ago, foreskins became big business. Recent news from England suggests they might be making a most surprising comeback, and not in the area of the body one might expect.
Around 800 AD the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne announced he had in his possession a snipped-off slip of skin taken from the infant Jesus during his circumcision. Some legends say Charlemagne received Jesus’s foreskin—a relic known as the “Divine Prepuce”—from an angel. Others say it was a wedding gift from his betrothed, the Empress of Byzantium. A severed piece of male anatomy may have had a different cultural significance at the time, but it’s little wonder that he called off the wedding.
Not long after Charlemagne made his claim, other holy foreskins began popping up around Europe. In Sweden, Saint Birgitta told of the Virgin Mary presenting the last remnant of her murdered son in a vision. In Italy, Saint Catherine of Sienna imagined wearing it as an engagement ring. Kings sought pieces to place under their marital beds, to insure their queens would become pregnant with a male heir to the throne. Nine months later, these same queens kept the relic nearby as they gave birth. Its scent was said to make for an easy delivery. Soon so many holy foreskins existed that John Calvin wondered how big the original must have been that it could be cut into so many pieces.
The history of Jesus’s foreskin and other holy relics reminds us that, once upon a time, certain lifeless body parts were commodities to be traded, bought, and sometimes stolen. It is surely a practice that belongs in a mostly forgotten corner of human history.
Yet according to London’s Daily Mail, British scientists have now developed a Botox-like skin treatment manufactured of cells from the freshly circumcised skin of newborn babies. Removed from infant males in the United States (whose mothers have apparently given consent), the foreskins are then shipped to England, where they are processed to draw out tiny skin cells called fibroblasts. These fibroblasts are suspended in a clear liquid and injected into the skin to fill wrinkles and pock marks in the faces of dermatology patients. The process—developed by the British biotech company Intercytex—is currently being tested under the supervision of the Food and Drug Administration and the British Human Tissue Authority. A bottle of the treatment, enough to repair one cheek’s worth of acne scars, costs more than a thousand dollars.
In the age of religious relics, the objects identified as the body parts of saints were offered for sale by merchants as they went from village to village. It was commonly known that some of these supposed relics were stolen from graveyards right outside of town. People bought them anyway, desperate for any advantage, no matter how unlikely, in their race against the ravages of time. Promising safe childbirth, relief from sickness, and protection from physical harm, relics were the medical marvels of the day. Officially it was illegal to buy and sell these sacred keepsakes, but relic dealers made a mint.
They also gave rise to new questions. The holy foreskin especially caused endless theological head-scratching. Jesus was supposed to be eternally perfect and complete. How could a piece of him remain on earth? Some suggested that on the day Jesus rose to heaven, his foreskin rose too, flapping up toward the clouds like a butterfly.
Thinking of all those more recently cut foreskins packed onto a cargo plane and flying off to England to be turned into high-tech wrinkle cream, it is useful to remember that it used to be only saints’ body parts that were bought and sold. Now the market seems wide open.
It is inevitable that medical and scientific advances will challenge our sense of what are bodies are for. Yet it is just as likely that many supposed advances will come to seem not only as embarrassing or bizarre as ancient practices do today, but deeply troubling as well. Faced with this innovative use of the newest of human bodies, perhaps like those perplexed theologians of long ago, we should start asking new questions about what it means to make a commodity of the stuff we’re made of, and who will most profit from its use.
Peter Manseau is editor of Search.
