Thank God It Was a Hoax!

While I haven't played my cello in quite some time, it was a relief to learn today that the condition known as "cello scrotum" does not actually exist. It was just a hoax perpetrated by an English doctor, Elaine Murphy, when she submitted a letter to the British Medical Journal in 1974. It was supposedly a painful condition caused by the cello rubbing against the cellist's body. Now I had never actually heard about this until I read the news today, but even when I read it, I wondered how anyone would actually believe it. If someone is playing the cello correctly, it would be nowhere near coming into contact with the cellist's groin. How anyone could have believed this in the first place is beyond me.