This review essay discusses the debates on infant male circumcision and on paediatric cochlear implants, two instances of surgical interventions done on small children without there being any pressing life-threatening indication. Reviewing these two issues together—something that has not previously been done, although there is a vast scholarly debate on both issues separately—helps frame the medical humanities and the current turn in the field towards abandoning the nature/culture and science/humanities divides. The debates on these procedures are fraught with a distinction between medicine and culture which constructs a certain kind of body as ‘natural’ and seeks to defend that body against ‘cultural’ interventions while welcoming supposedly acultural ‘medical’ interventions on other bodies. In the scholarship in medical humanities and medical ethics on these topics, this implicit nature/culture divide and view on medicine as separate from culture is also evident. My contention is that the medical humanities have important work to do here, in particular regarding a critique of the notion of the ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ body.

中文翻译：

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文化声称：包皮环切术、人工耳蜗和“完整”的身体

这篇评论文章讨论了关于婴儿男性包皮环切术和儿科人工耳蜗植入的争论，这是对幼儿进行的手术干预的两个实例，但没有任何危及生命的紧迫迹象。将这两个问题放在一起审查——这是以前从未做过的事情，尽管对这两个问题分别进行了广泛的学术辩论——有助于构建医学人文科学以及该领域当前朝着放弃自然/文化和科学/人文分歧的转变。关于这些程序的辩论充满了医学和文化之间的区别，医学和文化将某种身体构造为“自然的”，并试图保护该身体免受“文化”干预，同时欢迎对其他身体的所谓非文化“医学”干预。在这些主题的医学人文和医学伦理学研究中，这种隐含的自然/文化鸿沟和将医学与文化分开的观点也很明显。我的论点是医学人文学科在这里有重要的工作要做，特别是关于对“整体”或“完整”身体概念的批判。