I have done quite a bit of reading on how circumcision, which around the Mediterranean was practiced only by Jews and Muslims, spread into "Western" countries. It is quite an interesting story, and it may also shed a light about current or at least recent practices. I'm posting this as "medical but non medfet", as this is for serious discussion.
Nineteenth century monographs on surgery describe various methods for circumcision. The main indication is phimosis, meaning a tight foreskin that cannot be retracted. This condition is normal in babies, but normally resolves itself without surgery. It can be compounded by the foreskin staying "glued" to the glans.
Why is phimosis an issue? Let us begin with the reasonable reasons. If the foreskin cannot be pulled back, then some sebaceous secretions known as "smegma" accumulate under it. Bacteria can settle in, leading to balano-posthitis. Balanitis is an inflammation of the glans, and posthitis that of the foreskin.
Furthermore, if the foreskin stays tight, then erection may be painful; sexual intercourse may be difficult. It is said that King Louis XVI of France could not originally sire a heir due to this reason, and had to get surgery. In the 19th century, sexual pleasure was suspect, and, according to many authors, its only legitimate use was procreation.
Thus, it made sense to physicians, and still makes sense to them today, to remove a child's foreskin, if suffering from phimosis, to prevent possible future infections and protect his future adult capacity to produce offspring. It is, I think, debatable whether these concerns about hypothetic future problems are valid reasons to act early on an issue that progressively solves itself in most boys. But physicians had other concerns!
According to many of these books, smegma would cause some itching. Some authors accused genital itching of causing a variety of nervous problems in children. Furtermore, boys would then try to relieve this irritation with their hand, which would lead them into masturbation. Once the habit would have settled in, it would be difficult to cure. Masturbation was considered a very serious condition, as we would consider alcoholism or drug consumption today: it was considered to cause a vast variety of developmental, nervous and mental issues, including epilepsy.
These textbooks thus advised circumcision in case of phimosis, or even in case of mere long foreskin, so as to prevent masturbatory habits from settling in. But they went further. Some claimed that masturbation was rarer among Jews. Some claimed circumcision should be done more generally as a prophylactic measure against masturbation. Some advocated circumcising boys and men suffering from various diseases or mental issues in the hope that it would have a positive effect.
Similar recommendations about circumcision, masturbation, long foreskin… were made in books addressed not to other physicians, but to families, especially mothers. Sometimes they used euphemisms such as "bad habits" instead of masturbation.
Some authors claimed that venereal diseases, especially syphilis (which is a serious condition for which medicine had no valid treatment before penicillin was invented), would spread less easily to circumcised men, because the circumcised glans thickens and thus allows germs less easily in, and because germs cannot accumulate in the folds of the skin, or at least less easily. Similar claims are made today about HIV and other diseases. At least this seems valid reasoning; but my impression was that these were minor concerns compared to masturbation.
If circumcision could prevent masturbation, maybe it could "cure" it? Obviously, masturbation is impossible as the scar heals, so the waiting period could break the bad habit. But some physicians went further. It is well-known that Dr Kellogg, the brother of the corn flake entrepreneur, advocated circumcising masturbators without anesthesia, in order to ingrain fear in the boy. One would be mistaken to consider him as an extreme, unrepresentative quack. For instance, in France, Dr Richet, a man after whom streets are named, made the same recommendation (and, of course, put it in practice). So, yes, some Western physicians, and not just those remembered as quacks, advocated surgical punishment, which we often associate with "backward" Eastern countries.
It is often claimed that male circumcision and female genital mutilation have nothing to do with each other: one is a legitimate medical procedure with positive hygienic outcomes, the other gratuitous cruelty inflicted on woman following backward cultural and religious mores. In reality, in the Western world, they went hand in hand. Doctors who wrote pages and pages on the dangers of masturbation in boys (and men) also wrote about the dangers of masturbation in girls (and women). And thus some doctors advocated the surgical treatment of masturbation in girls.
The extent of surgical treatment against masturbation meted on boys was limited by the need to preserve their capacities for procreation. Only those considered unfit for marriage, due to severe mental or physical disabilities, could be subjected to castration. Any surgery would need to preserve capacity for procreation, which involved capacity for copulation. Some physicians advocated tight circumcision, of a form that makes unlubricated friction uncomfortable, as a way to make masturbation unpleasant while preserving capacity for coitus in a lubricated vagina.
Unfortunately for women, the clitoris has no role in procreation (except that women who experience sexual pleasure may be more inclined to seek coitus). Thus some physicians advocated removing the glans of the clitoris for the same host of reasons that they advocated removing the male foreskin. Some of these physicians, such as the infamous Isaac Baker Brown, were called out publicly as charlatans by their colleagues, and expelled from professional societies. But milder cases prospered. The French physician Broca, again a man after whom streets and hospitals are named, advocated applying sutures to the labia majora of a girl who masturbated so as to prohibit contact of the clitoris with fingers; at least the idea was that, when she becomes an adult of marriageable age, she would have these sutures removed.
So, indeed, surgeries for preventing or curing masturbation in males and females were practiced differently, though they were rooted in the same beliefs. Circumcision of boys under anesthesia, or of babies without anesthesia, was commonplace. Castration was rare, reserved for the mentally ill or other "basket cases". We do not have statistics, but I'd say removal of clitorises was rather rare, but perhaps less so than castration.
We could just dismiss this as old quackery. Indeed, when one reads these old medical books with a modern scientific eye, one is struck by their weak epistemology. A physician has a boy or a girl with a certain non genital problem, he operates surgically on his or her genitals, the problem seems to decrease, and voilà, a new treatment is born and the physician reports it as a general fact. Nowadays, one would surely require statistics, "double blind" studies and so on. Let us now see current times.
Concerns about hygiene, sexually transmitted diseases, prevention of balanitis… continued justifying routine circumcision until the 21st century. Concerns about masturbation were gradually dropped. Recall, however, that up into the 1960s there were boarding schools and parents who took precautions against masturbation (e.g., having boys and girls sleep on their back with hands visible outside of bed covers). Several men and women of this site recall being punished, threatened with corporal punishment, or receiving corporal punishment, after parents caught the masturbating. And it's not only very elderly folks; some were growing up in the 1970s.
This brings me to my own situation. I was circumcised for phimosis in the early 1980s, after the doctor advised my mother to try to retract my foreskin by force at bath-time, which did not work. Nowadays, I'm told, they advise the boy to try to retract his foreskin himself. Why the change? One withstands self-inflicted pain much better than pain inflicted by others. So why didn't they do the same for me? I suspect that one reason is that asking a boy to ease his foreskin would have smacked too much of inciting him to masturbate, the echo of earlier concerns.
I think I have established that 19th-century and early 20th-century quack medicine have led to ingrained cultural habits. America continues routinely circumcising boys even though the masturbation scare and taboo has largely withered. Somewhat amusingly, evidence-based medicine is still not fully a thing; for instance, people cite protection against venereal diseases without comparing the situation of venereal diseases in the US and Europe, where circumcision is rarer.