A Curious History of Sex

by Kate Lister

  Four months later in October, thirty-four-year-old Polish labourer Joseph Wozniak awoke lying in a vacant lot, with little recollection of how he came to be there. Wozniak had been out drinking with his friend Kuchnisky in Milwaukee Avenue, and the last thing he recalled was hailing a taxicab to go home. His head ached, he felt disorientated and he had a strong chemical taste in his mouth. Wozniak managed to stagger home to Seventeenth Street in the north of Chicago. A severe pain in his groin had grown steadily worse throughout the day until Wozniak admitted himself to hospital to be treated by Dr Sampolinski, who discovered that Wozniak’s testicles had also been removed. The strong chemical taste Wozniak had in his mouth was chloroform.

  Reports of the case of testicular theft even made it to the UK. Dundee Evening Telegraph, Monday 16 October 1922.

  Shocked, Dr Sampolinski called the police, and as soon as the media picked up the story, Joseph Wozniak was reported around the world as a victim of ‘gland larceny’. Wozniak’s drinking buddy Kuchnisky was missing, and police believed he must have suffered a similar fate to his friend, but was too embarrassed to come forward and had gone into hiding. Upon reading about the Wozniak case in the papers, Henry Johnson came forward to report his attack. It quickly became apparent that not only were these cases linked, but they were most likely carried out by a surgeon.

  It is believed that this outrage was committed by gang of thieves to supply the new demand for glands for human rejuvenation. The greatest indignation prevails in Chicago medical circles. Dr Sampolinski, who was called in to treat Wozniak, said that the removal of the glands was made presumably to supply the want of some wealthy aged patient. Wozniak, who is a Polish war veteran, informed the police that he met a stranger who appeared to take an interest in him, and when he learned that Wozniak was hunting for a job gave him £2 and treated him to several drinks. ‘He ordered a taxicab to drive me home,’ said Wozniak. ‘Four men were in the taxicab, and before I knew what had happened a sack was thrown over my head, and I lost consciousness. When I regained consciousness I was in a vacant house. My mind was befuddled, and I did not at first know that I had been operated on. I was dazed from the drink … Then I tasted chloroform in my mouth, and felt intense pain. I managed to get home, and called [Dr] Sampolinski, who told me what had happened to me.’27

  The following year, there were two more attacks within twenty-four hours of each other. Taxi driver Charles Ream was drugged and had both testicles removed, and John Powell of North Chicago was mutilated, but escaped with his testes intact.

  Leading physicians in the field of rejuvenation were swift to condemn and distance themselves from such barbarism. Voronoff himself stated that ‘the surgeon who did it should be compelled to suffer a like fate himself’.28 The case sent Chicago residents into a panic and the police braced themselves for ‘an epidemic of gland robberies like the Burke and Hare epidemic in [the UK]’. Fortunately, the epidemic never came, but the attackers were never caught.

  Testicles were big business in the first half of the twentieth century and numerous products hit the market claiming to provide all the benefits of testicle grafting without the expense or having to go under the knife. And unlike beauty products today, these ones were proud to be full of bollocks. ‘Gland Extract Tablets’ promised ‘perfection without drugs’.

  Gland face creams advertised themselves as being able to ‘permanently remove all traces of lines, wrinkles, crow’s-feet, sagging muscles, and all facial blemishes’.

  Eventually, the craze for gland surgeries and gland-based beauty products fell out of favour. How many people and animals had their genitals mutilated in the quest for sexual potency and a less wrinkled forehead is unknown. Although the idea of grafting monkey bollocks into your own genitals may sound utterly horrific to us today, people still to turn to extreme and bizarre surgical options in an effort to stop the clock on old age. Plastic surgery, Botox injections, penis enlargement surgeries, vaginal tightening, and all manner of lotions, potions and woo-woo are sought out in the fight against old age and impotence. We might laugh at the gland surgeons, but I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t rub a cream made of testicles on my face if I thought it could knock out a few wrinkles. The twentieth-century craze for gland treatment is testament to both our insecurities and our vanity. Even at the height of Voronoff’s fame, there were those who urged people to reject such nonsense and embrace ageing with a bit of dignity – a sentiment that rings as true today as it did then.

  ‘Rejuvenating Tablets’ made from glands to prevent ageing, 1926.

  Anti-ageing face cream made from glands, 1938.

  * * *

  * Other physicians working in gland and rejuvenation surgery included Victor Darwin Lespinasse (1878–1946), George Frank Lydston (1858–1923) and Leo Leonidas Stanley (1886–1976).

  1 Glenn Matfin, ‘The Rejuvenation of Testosterone: Philosopher’s Stone or Brown-Séquard Elixir?’, Therapeutic Advances in Endocrinology and Metabolism, 1.4 (2010), 151–54 .

  2 Charles Éduoard Brown-Séquard, The Elixir of Life: Dr. Brown-Séquard’s Own Account of His Famous Alleged Remedy for Debility and Old Age, ed. by Newell Dunbar (Boston: J.G. Cupples, 1889), pp. 21–6.

  3 Ibid., p. 23.

  4 Ibid., p. 25.

  5 Charles Éduoard Brown-Séquard, ‘Note on the Effects Produced on Man by Subcutaneous Injections of a Liquid Obtained from the Testicles of Animals’, The Lancet, 134.3438 (1889), pp. 105–7 .

  6 Le Petit Parisien, ‘Jouvence’, 8 October 1919. See also Catherine Remy, ‘“Men Seeking Monkey-Glands”: The Controversial Xenotransplantations of Doctor Voronoff, 1910–30’, French History, 28.2 (2014), pp. 226–40 .

  7 John B. Nanninga, The Gland Illusion: Early Attempts at Rejuvenation Through Male Hormone Therapy (London: McFarland, 2017), Kindle edition, location 1125.

  8 Serge Voronoff, Quarante-Trois Greffes Du Singe À L’homme (Paris: G. Doin, 1924), p. 90.

  9 Aberdeen Press and Journal, ‘Monkey Gland Patient Dead’, 1923, p. 7.

  10 Serge Voronoff, Rejuvenation by Grafting (London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1925), pp. 118–119.

  11 Ibid., pp. 68–127.

  12 Nanninga, The Gland Illusion, location 1232.

  13 The Times, ‘Dr Voronoff’s Operations: A Meeting of Protest’, 8 June 1928.

  14 Nanninga, The Gland Illusion, location 1638.

  15 R. Alton Lee, The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015), p. 219.

  16 Quoted in Pope Brock, Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008), p. 264.

  17 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Letter to the Editor’, in The Saturday Review of Literature, 1928, p. 1043.

  18 David Hamilton, The Monkey Gland Affair (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986), p. 91.

  19 Eugen Steinach and Josef Löbel, Sex and Life: Forty Years of Biological and Medical Experiments (New York: Viking, 1940), p. 176.

  20 E. Steinach, ‘Biological Methods Against the Process of Old Age’, Medical Journal and Record, 25 (1927), p. 79.

  21 ‘Current Comment, “Glandular Therapy”’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 83 (1924), p. 1004.

  22 Sharon Romm, The Unwelcome Intruder: Freud’s Struggle with Cancer (New York, NY, USA: Praeger, 1983), pp. 17–23.

  23 Quoted in Nanninga, The Gland Illusion, location 1549.

  24 S. Lock, ‘“O That I Were Young Again”: Yeats and the Steinach Operatio’, BMJ, 287.6409 (1983), pp. 1964–68 .

  25 Portsmouth Evening News, ‘Gland Rejuvenation’, 22 April 1939, p. 8.

  26 Nottingham Evening Post, ‘Seven Methods Explained’, 15 July 1924, p. 1.

  27 Dundee Evening Telegraph, ‘Youth Glands Stolen’, 16 October 1922, p. 7.

  28 Ibid.

  Tough
Love

  Medieval Impotence Tests

  As we have seen, throughout history people have submitted to extreme treatments in order to try and combat impotence. But it was only when the US Food and Drug Administration approved Sildenafil (tradename Viagra) on 27 March 1998 that there was finally a treatment that worked. The advent of Viagra did more than offer hope to millions of men around the world, it medicalised erectile dysfunction. In fact, it’s thanks to Viagra that we even have the term ‘erectile dysfunction’. Until the blue pill revolution, no one had ‘erectile dysfunction’, they were simply ‘impotent’, and this had to be accepted as a fact of life along with a receding hairline and middle-aged spread. As Viagra’s advertising executive Ken Begasse Jr explained:

  Just calling it erectile dysfunction, as opposed to impotence, was one of the first major decisions that was made by Pfizer and the [ad] agency, to remove that social stigma. The initial ads – many of the ads – while they were seen as Viagra ads, were actually men’s health ads. They were really there to break down the stigma.1

  The effects of Sildenafil were discovered by accident when UK scientists at Pfizer were testing it as a cardiovascular drug to lower blood pressure. The irony that Viagra was once thought to lower anything at all is almost too delicious to bear, but it is true nonetheless. The drug works by increasing blood flow into the penis during sexual arousal, which means that ‘Captain Standish’ (1890) can steer into port, rather than capsizing in the shallows. This unexpected side effect was reported when members of the clinical trial refused to give the medication back to Pfizer.2

  Paintings of carousing in taverns and brothels were very popular with sixteenth-century collectors in the Netherlands. Joachim Beuckelaer, Brothel, 1562.

  It’s easy to make jokes about Viagra, but it has spearheaded a sexual revolution. According to the Pharmaceutical Journal, the drug has been prescribed for more than 64 million men worldwide. According to Time magazine, when the drug was first launched demand was so great that doctors had to use rubber stamps just to keep up with the prescriptions.3 Of course, we all know Viagra is used recreationally by silly sods who believe that popping a pill will morph their penis into a Power Ranger, but the drug wasn’t made for them. Viagra can offer more than the opportunity to ‘dance with your arse to the ceiling’ (1904). Successfully treating erectile dysfunction can have a dramatic effect on a patient’s mental health. In 2006, research published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that men treated with Sildenafil produced ‘substantial improvements in self-esteem, confidence, and sexual relationship satisfaction. Improvements in these psychosocial factors were observed cross culturally and correlated significantly and tangibly with improvements in erectile function.’4

  Today, a trip to the pharmacy or an online form may be all that stands between you and your happy ending, but things were far from this simple in a pre-Viagra world. The medieval Church looked on marriage (and indeed sex) as necessary to procreation. So central was sex to married life that the twelfth-century text on canon law, Decretum, listed impotence as grounds for annulment.* Divorce was all but impossible in the medieval world, and even if it was granted, neither party was allowed to remarry while the other one lived. But impotence was regarded as a lawful impediment to marriage if it was kept a secret from the wife when they wed. Next time you’re at a wedding and the officiator asks if anyone knows of any ‘lawful impediment’ why the couple cannot be joined, just remember that you are legally bound to inform the congregation if you know that the groom’s ‘winkie’ (1962) is on the fritz. Impotence suits allowed a medieval woman to take her husband to court to annul her marriage and, crucially, if the annulment was granted, both parties could remarry.5

  To the medieval Church this made perfect sense: no sex, no children, no point. However, this was not as easy as a wife announcing her husband couldn’t get it up, and packing his bags for the off. The Church did not trust women to tell the truth, and certainly did not like annulling marriage. As keen as they were that their flock ‘go forth and multiply’, several criteria had to be met before the Church would agree to a couple separating. The couple would usually have to be married for at least three years before a case could be brought. If the husband denied the charges, the wife would be requested to produce witnesses to testify that she was a truthful person. If the husband admitted that he was impotent, the couple’s neighbours would have to testify that they were of honest character, and they had seen no evidence to contradict the claims. And, crucially, the Church required ‘proof’ of the husband’s impotence.6

  But how do you ‘prove’ your husband wields a less than magic ‘Johnson’ (1863)? Today, a doctor may carry out a nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) test, an intracavernosal injection test or even order a Doppler ultrasound. But in the twelfth century, all that was required was a group of ‘wise matrons’, a priest and an event known as ‘congress’. Congress was required in most annulments proceeding from a charge of impotence, and it meant a group of women subjecting the accused man to a public examination and sustained efforts to rouse the beast. In Summa Confessorum, Thomas of Chobham (1160–1230) recommended the following:

  After food and drink the man and woman are to be placed together in one bed and wise women are to be summoned around the bed for many nights. And if the man’s member is always found useless as if dead, the couple are well able to be separated.7

  The results of these tests can be found throughout medieval court records, and they do not make for comfortable reading. Take, for example, the 1370 case of John Sanderson of the city of York. John’s wife Tedia took her case to the ecclesiastical court, who ordered three women to inspect poor John’s ‘jiggle stick’ (1890). Congress was performed and the matrons reported the following back to the court:

  the member of the said John is like an empty intestine of mottled skin and it does not have any flesh in it, nor veins in the skin, and the middle of its front is totally black. And said witness stroked it with her hands and put it in semen and having thus been stroked and put in that place it neither expanded nor grew. Asked if he has a scrotum with testicles she says that he has the skin of a scrotum, but the testicles do not hang in the scrotum but are connected with the skin as is the case among young infants.8

  In 1368, Katherine Paynel demanded her husband, Nicholas, be examined and unsurprisingly Nicholas refused to submit to this. However, this did not stop Katherine calling various witnesses to testify that Nicholas had never risen to the occasion. Thomas Waus told the court that Katherine had:

  often tried to find the place of the said Nicholas’ genitals with her hands when she lay in bed with said Nicholas and he was asleep, and that she could not stroke nor find anything there and that the place in which Nicholas’ genitals ought be is as flat as the hand of a man.9

  In 1292 in Canterbury, twelve women of ‘good reputation’ testified that Walter de Fonte’s ‘virile member’ was utterly ‘useless’. In 1433, at the trial of John of York, things got carried away when one matron:

  exposed her naked breasts and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she held and rubbed the penis and testicles of the said John. And she embraced and frequently kissed the said John, and stirred him up in so far as she could to show his virility and potency, admonishing him for shame that he should then and there prove and render himself a man. And she says, examined and diligently questioned, that the whole time aforesaid, the said penis was scarcely three inches long.

  In each case, the wife was granted her annulment and given permission to find a man who could ‘better serve and please her’.10

  Medieval canon law recognised two types of impotence: permanent impotence caused by a physical inability to have sex, and temporary impotence that was thought to be caused by witchcraft. For it was well known that impotence was often caused by magic, rather than by any personal failing on the man’s side.

  Burchard, Bishop of Worms, warned of such things in his eleventh-century penitential:

  Have yo
u done what some adulterous women are accustomed to do? When first they learn that their lovers want to take legitimate wives, they extinguish the men’s desire by some magic art, so that they cannot be of use to their legitimate wives, or have intercourse with them. If you have done this or taught others, you should do penance for forty days on bread and water.11

  As we have already seen, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s infamous witch-hunting manual, The Malleus Maleficarum (1486), has a lot to say about impotence, and devotes an entire chapter to how witches ‘impede the power of generation’. Using their dark powers, witches can dry up a man’s semen reserves or cast a spell to ‘magically injure the power of generation – that is, so that a man cannot have sex’.12 What’s more, according to Kramer and Sprenger, a witch can do much worse than simply cursing your ‘jumble giblets’ (1890), they can remove the entire penis if they feel like it. Or rather, they can bewitch the ‘gigglestick’ (1944) so it is ‘hidden by an evil spirit who uses the art of illusion so that they cannot be seen or touched’.13 Kramer and Sprenger address common gossip that some witches remove the ‘family jewels’ (1911) and keep them hidden in trees, nests or boxes:

  What are we to think about those witches who shut up penises in what are sometimes prolific numbers, twenty or thirty at a single time, in a bird’s nest or some kind of box, where they move about in order to eat oats and fodder, as though they were alive – something which many people have seen and is reported by common gossip?14