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A supposed reproduction of a medical journal article describing an unusual case of scrotum self-repair using a stapler was a ubiquitous piece of faxlore back in the pre-internet days: This article about a machine shop worker who sliced his scrotum open while masturbating with a piece of machinery (causing the loss of a testicle), then simply stapled the sac back together, was popular fodder in text-based Internet discussion groups in the early 1990s. Despite the clinical tone of the article, told from a first-person perspective of the doctor who treated the patient's resulting injuries and infection, many readers found the scenario described too bizarre to be true and suspected it was a hoax crafted by someone working in the medical field. As a first step towards verifying or debunking this item, we tracked down a copy of the medical journal that had supposedly published the article and ascertained that the article did indeed appear in the July 1991 issue of Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality. Still, some doubters didn't consider that to be sufficient proof that the events described therein had actually occurred — the journal editors might have been fooled by a doctor who sent in a fictitious case report as a prank, they insisted. So, we tracked down the physician whose name appeared at the head of the article and contacted him to see if he could verify the account and supply any additional information. He replied to us as follows in 1994:
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