Monkey Glands

Dr Eugen Steinach (1861-1944)

The first endocrinologist, known to his grateful colleagues as “Father Christmas”

The 19^th century self-made man affirmed himself in the dirt dark stink of the Industrial Revolution. Impoverished rural peasantry, seeking a portion of the new wealth, provided near-slave labour for his mills, forges, factories and mines.

The massive profits from the surging wave of wealth poured into the pockets of the fresh-minted naïve “businessmen”. Along with the flow of cash, came eager entrepreneurs fully prepared to leech off what they could; some of these were doctors.

“Where there’s muck there’s brass”, as my Granny would not have said.

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The 18^th century’s most revered surgeon, the Scotsman John Hunter, was a rigorous scientist – the greatest of anatomists and the founder of experimental pathology – inexhaustible researcher. One of ten children, he had had no formal education and was said to have been virtually inarticulate. It was one of Hunter’s innumerable experiments which revealed the virilising effects of the transplantation of the testicles of the vigorous slim crowing rooster into the abdominal cavity of the capon, the indolent fat crowless castrated rooster.

Hunter had demonstrated that the presence of the testicles was interconnected with the manifestations of masculinity. Contemporaneous science had not allowed him to recognise the identity of the connecting agent, but he proposed that it was one of the ancient liquid “humors”.

It was a hundred years later, on 20^th July 1889, that the highly eccentric Dr Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard’s “Note on the Effects Produced on Man by Subcutaneous Injections of a Liquid Obtained from the Testicles of Animals” was published in the Lancet. At the age of 72, the peripatetic son of an American father and a French Mauritian mother, Brown-Séquard claimed that his sexual powers had been reinvigorated by the self-injection of a juice prepared from the testicles of guinea pigs and dogs, and that his “Elixir” would prolong human life.

Brown-Séquard’s report had been met with considerable derision from his peers, who, rightly, claimed his findings were explained by a strong placebo effect. Nevertheless, opportunist “organotherapists” performed the iniquitously expensive treatment on many thousands of needy men of means.

Brown-Séquard had set wheels in motion having focused scientists’ attention on the possibility that the human testicle could offer, in some way, the revitalisation of older men’s waning attributes.

The Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach (1861-1944) had become interested in the thesis of the “chemical messenger”. The English physiologist Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927) had shown that whenever food or acid entered the duodenum, a blood borne stimulus was released which caused the pancreas to secrete. It was dubbed “secretin”, and Starling postulated that the body produces many of these chemical messengers. In 1905, Starling proposed that these substances, Hunter’s humors, should be called “hormones” (Greek hormon, “that which sets in motion”), triggering the foundation of a totally new discipline, “endocrinology”.

Steinach, following up on Brown-Séquard’s faulty conclusions, thought it was worth pursuing part of the concept, and experimented by transplanting the testicles of a guineapig into a female guineapig. The female promptly adopted the mounting behaviour of the male. Steinach convinced himself that, as the testicles’ secretions were associated with sexuality, homosexuality could be cured by similar transplantation.

Steinach also convinced himself – and some others – that partial vasectomy was effective in rejuvenation. To be “steinached” was a short-lived fad. Sigmund Freud was steinached, and “was ambiguous about its effect”. Between 1921 and 1938, Steinach was unsuccessfully nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Meantime, a French surgeon born in Russia, Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff (1866-1951), was occupied in researching the effects of castration on eunuchs employed in the Egyptian court whilst he was acting as physician to the Khedive. Voronoff had observed that eunuchs aged quickly and were “sickly”. He concluded that “possession of active genital glands was the best possible assurance for a long life”.

Having restored the sexual vigour of an ageing ram by transplanting the testicles of a lamb, he began the practice of transplanting the testicles of newly executed criminals into wealthy oldsters. So popular did this technique become that demand far outstripped supply.

In 1920, Voronoff had become the fourth husband of American socialite Fannie Bostwick, the errant daughter of the devout Baptist Jabez Bostwick, co-founder of Standard Oil with large stakes in cotton and railroads. Previously, Fannie had become Voronoff’s laboratory assistant in Paris, helping to expand his ever-growing practice, turning from the scarce resource of human testicles to the more readily available monkeys’ testicles.

The Voronoff monkeys were carefully bred in their glamorous farm in Ventimiglia on the Italian Rivera, much visited by celebrities of the day.

Thin slices of the testicles of baboons and chimpanzees were stitched on to the elderly patients’ failing testicles. The intention was that the two tissues would fuse together to relieve the troublesome symptoms of their senility. By the 1930’s many thousands of men worldwide had been “rejuvenated”. At a meeting of the 1923 International Congress of Surgeons, Voronoff’s success had been enthusiastically endorsed by the 700 members.

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As Irving Berlin wrote for the Marx Brothers to sing in 1925 –

“Oh, among the mangoes
Where the monkey gang goes
You can see them do
The little monkey doodle doo
Let me take you by the hand
Over to the jungle band
If you’re too old for dancing
Get yourself a monkey gland
And then let’s
Go, my little dearie
There’s the Darwin theory
Telling me and you
To do the Monkey Doodle Doo”