Lewis Albert Sayre was an orthopedic surgeon who practiced medicine in New York City, New York, during the second half of the nineteenth century and held a number of leadership positions in his profession. Over the course of his nearly fifty-year career, Sayre developed a number of surgical and nonsurgical treatments of bone problems including scoliosis and other forms of spinal curvature, club foot, and hip-joint disease resulting from tuberculosis infection. He also helped popularize circumcision, or surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis, as a treatment for a variety of medical conditions, including muscle paralysis and epilepsy, based on the theory, discredited as of 2025, that a chronically irritated foreskin could lead to diseases in other parts of the body. By providing a medical justification for circumcision, Sayre helped to embed the surgical procedure within US medicine, even as the medical rationales for its use would change periodically in the decades that followed.

Non-therapeutic infant circumcision is the surgical removal of healthy foreskin from a male infant, often shortly after birth, for the purpose of achieving potential future medical benefits. Today, in 2025, the practice is common the United States but not as common in other Western industrialized countries. Though circumcision itself is an ancient cultural practice, doctors began performing circumcision for medical purposes only in the nineteenth century, and primarily in English-speaking countries. Orthopedic surgeon Lewis Sayre, who practiced medicine in New York City, New York, in the late nineteenth century popularized circumcision as a treatment for conditions such as muscle paralysis. Sayre’s ideas eventually fell out of favor, but doctors increasingly identified other reasons to perform the procedure, including the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, urinary tract infections, and cancer. As of 2025, doctors, parents, ethicists, and others continue to debate the medical value of circumcision as well as the ethics of operating on the healthy genitals of people who cannot consent.