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Cellos Don’t Threaten Your Junk

January 28th, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy

For 35 years, male cellists have lived in fear* of “cello scrotum,” a painful condition caused by long hours of playing the instrument, resulting in sustained friction of the cello against the nutsack. It turns out now that the whole thing was a giant hoax. The author of the 1974 letter to the British Medical Journal that perpetrated the nonsense just came clean, after seeing the “condition” mentioned in a recent BMJ article.

The question this raises in my mind is a simple one. Had anyone involved ever seen a cello being played? The instrument is held between the knees. In order to come into sustained contact with the scrotum, you’d have to get all up on it, and it would very difficult to play it in that position. Any sufferer of “cello scrotum” didn’t get it from playing the cello. Unless by “playing,” we mean “repeatedly humping,” and by “cello,” we mean “unfinished lumber.”

Common sense isn’t always right, but it’s a good place to start. It seems like somebody at the BMJ could have had a little bit more of it.

* If by “lived in fear,” we mean “giggled about when drinking.”

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