Repeated attacks of herpes preputialis and some consequent point of induration are looked upon by Petit-Radel, Chauvin, and Bernard as frequent starting-points for the cancerous affection of the prepuce. The aged or persons of lax fibre being more subject to these inflammatory attacks, are also the most frequent victims of cancer in this situation. The celebrated Lallemand, in regard to the tendency to cancer induced by the presence of the prepuce, observes as follows:--
"Besides simple balanitis ... there also result various indurations, which are proportionate in their degree to the length or time and intensity with which the inciting inflammatory conditions have existed. I have repeatedly found the mucous lining of the prepuce thickened, hardened, ulcerated, and nodulated; at other times converted into a fibrous or even into cartilaginous tissue of excessive thickness; in others, still, in which it had assumed a scirrhous and cancerous nature. I have repeatedly operated on such cases, wherein the prolongation of the prepuce was the only recognized primary cause, the subjects being often countrymen of from fifty to sixty years of age, who had never known any women except their own, but who had, nevertheless, been long sufferers from balanitic attacks, accompanied by abundant acrid discharges, swellings of the prepuce, with more or less consequent excoriations and narrowing of the preputial orifice."[97]
Claparède sums up the inconveniences and dangers to which the possessor of a prepuce is liable to suffer from, as follows: "The retention of the sebaceous secretion is liable to alter its character, converting it into an acrid, irritating discharge, which induces more or less burning, smarting, itching, excoriations, and swelling, which, affecting the little glands situated about the corona and sulcus, induces them to secrete an altered and vicious secretion. In this manner a simple elongation of the prepuce will produce an inflammation of the surface of the glans (balanitis), or that of the prepuce itself (posthitis), or the two conjoined (balano-posthitis), complicated possibly with phimosis. By an extension to the mucous membrane of the urethra of the same condition of the inflammatory process, we have blennorrhagia; blennorrhagia is liable to be followed by inguinal swellings or tenderness, orchitis, stricture, and prostatic disease; the formation of preputial calculus, from retention of the urine in the prepuce; and cancer is apt to be the end of any of these conditions."[98]