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Introduction
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There are two ways of un-doing a circumcision: surgical reconstruction, in which a foreskin is created using tissue harvested from elsewhere on the body, such as the scrotum; and non-surgical restoration, which employs the process of tissue expansion to actually regrow foreskin from remaining foreskin cells. Surgical reconstruction has the benefit of speed, but the non-surgical restoration has almost invariably better results. Tissue expansion works by applying tension to cells you want to replicate, in this case the foreskin you have remaining. This tension stimulates mitosis, or cell division, growing new cells identical to the old. The resulting foreskin created from tissue expansion has all the characteristics and properties of actual foreskin because it is actual foreskin. This is the great benefit non-surgical restoration has compared to surgical reconstruction. The one draw-back is its speed: tissue expansion is a very slow process. A full restoration using the MTC method may take between two and four years of daily work. Non-surgical restoration can be accomplished by many methods, most of them using tape to in some way attach the foreskin to a source of tension. This website describes in depth one such method, the MTC method (for Modified T-taping and Cross-taping, the two means of restoration the method employs) and also touches on several other methods. |
History
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Records of surgical foreskin reconstruction, historically known as epispasm, go back at least as far as the first century. Aulus Cornelius Celsus described one technique in his work De Medicina: A circular incision was made around the base of the penis and the skin was peeled free of the shaft. The now mobile shaft skin was then pulled up far enough to cover the glans penis and bound in place until it healed. In Greece, male nudity was commonplace but exposure of the glans penis considered indecent. Those circumcised or with naturally short foreskins wore the kynodesme, a leather band that kept the remaining foreskin pulled over the glans penis. It was discovered that, over time, wearing the kynodesme actually made the foreskin grow. When exactly this first developed into a means of non-surgical restoration is unknown, but by the second century, Soranus of Ephesus describes in Gynecology a method of restoring a foreskin by tying wool to the remaining foreskin and stretching it, and roughly contemporary to his account, Galen of Pergamum's De Methodo Medendi recommends binding the foreskin up with a lead weight to facilitate growth. In modern times, much of the ancients' knowledge seems to have been forgotten and had to be learned all over again. The first modern surgical reconstruction occurred in 1963 and used skin harvested from the scrotum to recreate a foreskin. Tissue expansion had been rediscovered in 1957, but was not widely used until two decades later. In 1977, a new surgical method exploiting the principles of tissue expansion was tried which involved forcing the remaining foreskin over the glans penis and implanting a metal ring to hold it in place. Non-surgical methods followed shortly thereafter when the idea of using tape instead of a surgically implanted ring began spreading in the early 1980s. This process, known as cross-taping, is little more than an updated kynodesme. In the 1990s, when men began taping their foreskins to a source of tension--T-taping--to expediate growth, new life was breathed into the Soranus method. |