by Kate Lister
13 Albert the Great, ‘Questions on Animals’, quoted in Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. by M. Adamson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 55–6.
14 Gerald of Wales, The Jewel of the Church: A Translation of the Gemma Ecclesiastica, trans. by J.J. Hagen (Leiden: Brill, 1979), p. 109.
15 ‘Summa Theologica Index’, Sacred-Texts.Com, 2018
16 P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Malleus Maleficarum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), Kindle edition, location 1507.
17 Ibid., location 1474.
18 Ibid., location 1524.
19 William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Human Sexual Response (London: Churchill, 1966), pp. 7–8.
20 K. R. Turley and D. L. Rowland, ‘Evolving ideas about the male refractory period’, BJU International, 112 (2013), 442–52.
21 S. A. D. Tissot, Onanism; Or, A Treatise upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation; Or, The Dangerous Effects Of Secret and Excessive Venery ... Translated from the Last Paris Edition, By A. Hume. The Fifth Edition, Corrected, 5th edn (London: Richardson, 1781), p. 11.
22 Léopold Deslandes, A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism, Masturbation, Self-Pollution, and Other Excesses, 2nd edn (Boston: Otis, Broader and Company, 1839), p. 3.
23 J. H. Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young (Burlington: Segner, 1887), p. 294.
24 Ibid., p. 295.
25 Ibid., p. 296.
26 Robert Baden-Powell, Boy Scouts of America, 1st edn (New York: Page and Company, 1911), p. 345.
27 Albert Moll, Sexual Life of the Child (Classic Reprint) (London: Forgotten Books, 2015), p. 56.
28 Wilhelm Reich, The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), p. 9; Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948).
29 William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (London: Churchill, 1966), pp. 3–9.
30 Semir Zeki and Andreas Bartels, ‘The Neural Correlates of Maternal and Romantic Love’, Neuroimage, 21.3 (2004), 1155–66
31 B. Whipple, ‘Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) During Orgasm in Women’, Sexologies, 17 (2008), S45 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1158-1360(08)72639-2; Ruth G. Kurtz, ‘Hippocampal and Cortical Activity During Sexual Behavior in the Female Rat’, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 89.2 (1975), 158–69 https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076650; Mary S. Erskine, Joseph G. Oberlander and Jasmine J. Yang, ‘Expression of FOS, EGR-1, and ARC in the Amygdala and Hippocampus of Female Rats During Formation of the Intromission Mnemonic of Pseudopregnancy’, Developmental Neurobiology, 67.7 (2007), 895–908
32 James G. Pfaus and others, ‘The Role of Orgasm in the Development and Shaping of Partner Preferences’, Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology, 6.1 (2016), 31815
33 Stuart Brody and Rui Miguel Costa, ‘Satisfaction (Sexual, Life, Relationship, and Mental Health) is Associated Directly with Penile-Vaginal Intercourse, but Inversely with Other Sexual Behavior Frequencies’, The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 6.7 (2009), 1947–54
34 Beverly Whipple and Carol Rinkleib Ellison, Women’s Sexualities: Generations of Women Share Intimate Sexual Secrets of Sexual Self-Acceptance (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, US, 2000).
35 Randolph W. Evans and R. Couch, ‘Orgasm and Migraine’, Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain, 41.5 (2001), 512–14
36 Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (London: Flamingo, 1996) p. 14.
Gland Larceny
Testicular Transplants in the Twentieth Century
The link between ejaculating too often and a physical decline in health was an established medical fact until the twentieth century. So, what was a chap to do if his sexual potency had been drained and his manhood was in need of a reboot? An obvious remedy for depleting semen levels was to restock the reserves. The early twentieth century saw a medical craze for surgically rejuvenating ageing men by operating on their genitals to increase the amount of semen and/or sex hormones in the body. Depending on which physician you opted to visit, this could mean being subjected to a bilateral vasectomy, or having a monkey testicle grafted into your scrotum. These were the early days of endocrinology and hormone replacement therapy, and the doctors pushing these procedures touted them as a fountain of youth, albeit a fountain full of semen. But before you head off to look up ‘monkey balls’ on eBay, you should know that these procedures were discredited by the 1930s, when they were found to cause more harm than good (for both humans and monkeys alike).
In the 1880s, French physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817–1894) started injecting himself with testicular extracts from guinea pigs and dogs.1 He called his concoction the ‘elixir of life’, and believed it would replenish his own ‘seminal losses’. ‘I put forward the idea that if it were possible without danger to inject semen into the blood of old men, we should probably obtain manifestations of increased activity as regards the mental and the various physical powers.’ He continued:
It is well known that seminal losses, arising from any cause, produce a mental and physical debility which is in proportion to their frequency. These facts, and many others, have led to the generally-admitted view that in the seminal fluid, as secreted by the testicles, a substance or several substances exist which, entering the blood by resorption, have a most essential use in giving strength to the nervous system and to other parts.2
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817–1894) was a Mauritian physiologist and neurologist.
Convinced the ageing process could be reversed by boosting semen in the body, Brown-Séquard started to experiment on animals, trying to graft parts of guinea pigs into male dogs, and injecting ageing rabbits with the blood or semen taken from the testicles of younger rabbits, that kind of thing.3 Convinced all this seminal swapping was having a positive effect on his subjects, Brown-Séquard began injecting himself with a mixture of blood, semen and ‘juice extracted from testicles’ of dogs and guinea pigs.
To the three kinds of substances I have just named I added distilled water in a quantity which never exceeded three or four times their volume. The crushing was always done after the addition of water. When filtered through a paper filter the liquid was of a reddish hue, and rather opaque … For each injection I have used nearly one cubic centimeter of the filtered liquid.4
Immediately after these injections, Brown-Séquard reported being able to work for longer hours, experienced an increase in mental focus, and, at the age of seventy-two, could run up and down stairs again. Brown-Séquard published his findings in The Lancet, and legitimised organotherapy as a credible medical discipline.5
Brown-Séquard may have been an early pioneer, but the man responsible for making surgical rejuvenation mainstream was the Russian-born French surgeon Serge Voronoff (1866–1951). Voronoff was a laboratory director at the prestigious Collège de France when he made his name implanting monkey testicles into men who complained they were not as sprightly as they used to be. An expert manipulator of the press, Voronoff’s work became the subject of intense media focus around the world.
Mr Monkey Nuts himself, Dr Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff (1866–1951).
Before turning his full attention to monkey ‘bollocks’ (1000), Voronoff was a respected gynaecologist and had pioneered new surgical techniques in Les Feuillets de Chirurgie et de Gynecologie (1910). Influenced by the work of Brown-Séquard, Voronoff began experimenting on animals to see if grafting testicle glands from one animal into the body of another held rejuvenating properties. Convinced that it did, Voronoff presented his findings to the French Surgical Congress in 1919. Le Petit Parisien reported his fi
ndings the next day.
Doctor Serge Voronoff, director of the physiology laboratory at the Collège de France, offered a stunning communication to the surgical congress yesterday. He claims to have rejuvenated and reinvigorated aging goats and rams by grafting an interstitial gland taken from one of their own species … The entire human race will benefit from the success of Mr Voronoff’s projects, since he is working hard to obtain similarly successful results while operating on aging men by grafting the interstitial gland of a monkey. It does not matter what glands these might be. If their introduction, through the scalpel of Doctor Voronoff, can give our tired organisms youth and vigour, then long live interstitial glands.6
After repeating his experiment hundreds of times on sheep, dogs and bulls, in 1920 Voronoff began transplanting monkey glands into humans. He had originally wanted to use human testicles, taken from corpses and criminals, but soon realised he would never be able to secure a regular supply, so monkey nuts it was. Eventually, Voronoff had to buy a monkey colony near Nice to keep up with demand.7
The procedure was as simple as it was horrific. The chimp’s testicle would be removed and finely cut into longitudinal segments. An incision was then made into the patient’s scrotum to expose the testicles and membranes. The cut-up chimp testes were implanted underneath the tunica vaginalis membrane, and the incision was sewn back up. The theory was that the monkey glands would be absorbed directly into the patient’s own sex glands. The monkey was euthanised.
Voronoff knew the value of customer testimonials, and in his 1924 book, Forty-Three Grafts From Monkey to Man, he meticulously detailed his many successes, including a seventy-four-year-old Englishman, Arthur Liardet. Voronoff grafted a baboon’s ‘bobble’ (1889) into Arthur Liardet in 1921 and declared, ‘his man has truly been rejuvenated by 15 or 20 years. Physical state, genital vitality, all has radically changed from the results of the testicular transplant that transformed a senile old man, powerless and pitiful, into a vigorous man with all his capacities.’8 Despite being transformed ‘from tottering old age to the activity of a man in the prime of life’, Liardet died just two years later.9 Undeterred, in his 1925 book, Rejuvenation by Grafting, Voronoff declared that his ageing patients appeared fifteen years younger, and common ailments such as constipation, cramps, fatigue and colitis were all hugely improved. In cases of depression, post-surgery patients appeared to be ‘more alert, displayed increased vigour, jovial eyes, and had more energy’.10 Of course, one of the most commonly cited ailments Voronoff claimed to be able to cure was impotency and a lack of libido. One sixty-seven-year-old post-operative patient claimed that his sexual libido had returned to an ‘extraordinary degree’.11
Despite Voronoff’s confidence, the scientific community were less and less convinced that sewing monkey balls into an old man’s scrotum was a good thing. Scientists began trying to replicate Voronoff’s remarkable success and couldn’t. French veterinary surgeon Henri Velu experimented with testicular grafting on sheep to try and improve their health, but found this only resulted in grumpy sheep. He presented his findings before the French Veterinary Academy in 1929 where he called Voronoff ‘delusional’. Similar studies in Australia and Germany also found gland grafting produced no positive effects.12 To make matters worse, Voronoff was denied a licence to operate in Britain on grounds of animal cruelty. Leading anti-vivisectionists in the UK denounced Voronoff as ‘an offence against morality, hygiene, and decency’.13
But at least Voronoff was an established medical surgeon, which is more than could be said for the American John Richard Brinkley (1885–1942), who started grafting goat testicles into human subjects armed only with a bought medical diploma and a can-do attitude.14 Brinkley became known as the ‘goat gland doctor’, and made a great deal of money from convincing men he could restore their erection with a billy goat’s scruff. Inspired by the work of rejuvenists like Voronoff, Brinkley operated on hundreds of people (men and women) and given he really didn’t have the qualifications to be doing so, infections were common, and a number of patients died. Between 1930 and 1941, Brinkley was sued more than a dozen times for the wrongful death of a patient in his care.15 Eventually, Brinkley was exposed in court as a ‘charlatan and a quack in the ordinary, well-understood meaning of those words’, and was subsequently ruined by an avalanche of lawsuits.16 He declared bankruptcy in 1941, and died in poverty the following year.
While Voronoff escaped such a fate, by the closing years of the 1920s, the once great surgeon was attracting more mockery than praise. In 1928, shortly before Voronoff’s lecture series in London, George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to the London Daily News from the perspective of a monkey:
We apes are a patient and kindly race, but this is more than we can stand. Has any ape ever torn the glands from a living man to graft them upon another ape for the sake of a brief and unnatural extension of that ape’s life? … Man remains what he has always been; the cruellest of animals. Let him presume no further on his grotesque resemblance to us; he will remain what he is in spite of all of Dr Voronoff’s efforts to make a respectable ape of him.
Yours truly,
Consul Junior, The Monkey House Regents Park, May 26, 1928.17
By 1929, Voronoff claimed to have carried out almost five hundred gland transplants, but he had lost credibility with the public and his peers. Not only was new research disproving his theories, but his patients continued to age, deteriorate and die. Eventually, Voronoff’s name faded from the press, his work was widely condemned, and he was painted as just another quack. Voronoff and his theories may be long gone, but in one final disturbing twist, it has been suggested that the vogue for transplanting monkey tissue into humans may have been responsible for transferring simian immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) from apes to humans, leading to the global AIDS crisis today.18
Voronoff may have been one of the most notorious surgeons mangling scrotums in the quest for eternal youth, but he certainly wasn’t the only one.* Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach (1861–1944) believed that a bilateral vasectomy (tying the tubes of both testicles), would act like a kind of plug to keep semen in the body, which would boost a flagging sex drive. After experimenting on rats, Steinach refined his technique and moved on to human subjects. Steinach claimed his early experiments not only cured impotence, but his patients were younger, ‘more buoyant and alive’.19 Patients before the operation were described as being ‘subject to paralysing fatigue, disclination to work, failing memory, indifference and depression; all of which hinder or preclude progress and every kind of competition’, and, of course, they were ‘impotent’.20 The promise of eternal youth and a raging ‘hard-on’ (1864) are extremely seductive, and it’s little wonder the public responded to Steinach’s work so enthusiastically.
Eugen Steinach (1861–1944) pioneered a partial vasectomy to prevent ageing – despite this, he still died of old age.
Word of the ‘Steinach operation’ soon spread and physicians such as Harry Benjamin, Robert Lichtenstern, Victor Blum and Norman Haire set up their own clinics and started twisting the ‘nuts’ (1704) of men across Europe and America. But not everyone was convinced surgical rejuvenation worked. In 1924, an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association denounced surgical rejuvenation as open to ‘abuse and fantastic exploitation’ and scorned those who ‘are willing to grasp at such new suggestions towards accomplishing an invigorating end’.21 But this didn’t stop several high-profile figures from going under the knife.
Sigmund Freud was reported to have undergone a vasectomy at the hands of Dr Victor Blum in 1923 to try and cure him of cancer.22 The Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) went to Dr Norman Haire in London for a bilateral vasectomy to try and boost his libido and the quality of his work. Shortly after the procedure, Yeats wrote to a friend that he now felt ‘marvellously strong, with a sense of the future’.23 However, Ethel Mannin, who had a brief relationship with Yeats after the operation, later pronounced the Steinach o
peration a ‘failure’.24 Ouch.
Failure or not, in the first half of the twentieth century, glands were big business. Newspapers reported huge consignments of rhesus monkeys being transported to Australia to ‘meet the demands of patients for rejuvenation operations’.25 In 1924, Dr William Bailey, director of the American Endocrine Laboratories, outlined seven possible methods for surgical rejuvenation to the American Chemical Society:
1. Transplantation of a gland from one position to another.
2. Grafting portions of animal glands to human ones (Voronoff’s methods).
3. Cutting and binding the gland-ducts or vasoligature (Steinach’s operation).
4. Application of X-rays.
5. Use of radium emanations, or gamma rays.
6. ‘Drugging’ the gland with iodine or alcohol.
7. ‘Diathermia’, or the application of heat through high-frequency electricity.26
There was no shortage of surgeons who were willing to subject men’s ‘tallywags’ (1680) to all manner of quackery, but the Holy Grail (and most expensive) of the gland treatments was the transplant. Men feeling their youth slip away desperately clambered to get their hands on a pair of springy young gonads, through legal means, or not. The extent that some were willing to go to was laid bare in 1922.
On a bright summer morning in Chicago, in 1922, a man in his early thirties was found unconscious in a doorway at the corner of Ranch Avenue and Adam Street. Unable to rouse him, concerned residents took the man to the local country hospital where he was soon identified as Henry Johnson, an electrical employee who lived with his sister, Beryl Heiber. Johnson was examined by one of the hospital’s surgical interns who discovered that both Johnson’s testicles had been removed from the scrotal sack, and that the wound had been cleaned with antiseptic and ‘expertly’ stitched closed. Johnson recalled he had been drinking with a friend on Madison Street the night before. His last memory was getting into a streetcar to go home, and after that, everything was blank. Surgeons treating Johnson at the time believed he had been drugged prior to the attacks, and noted the level of surgical skill required to excise a man’s testicles without severing the testicular artery. Johnson was too embarrassed to report this to the police, and instead went home and returned to work.
