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Vasectomy: First used as treatment for criminals
In 1899, Dr. Harry C. Sharp, as medical officer of the Jefferson Reformatory in Indiana,
performed the first
vasectomy as treatment for a "criminal," i.e. a compulsive masturbator. A young man of
nineteen called Clawson,
greatly worried by his masturbatory habits, approached Dr. Sharp to request castration. Even
in 1899 no sane
doctor would have granted such a request. Dr. Sharp remarked, forty years later, "I did not
feel justified in
performing that mutilation." However, he did think that a vasectomy would help; and on the
12th October 1899
Clawson was sterilised by vasectomy. The operation apparently did the trick. Clawson
reported later that he had
stopped masturbating. But why this should be so is rather a mystery. Dr. Sharp's "success"
with "this fellow
Clawson" encouraged the doctor to carry out further vasectomies. In 1902 he published a
report of forty-two
voluntary vasectomies on men aged between seventeen and twenty-five, all offenders
imprisoned in Jeffersonville.