The most revolutionary aspect of the concept of sex hormones is the idea that sex is not restricted to the world of living organisms. Since the early decades of the twentieth century even chemicals have had a sex of their own. In their journals and textbooks scientists discuss male sex hormones, female sex hormones and […]

In the previous sections we have seen how sex endocrinologists gradually transformed the prescientific idea of a sexual duality located in the gonads into a conceptualization of sex that became more and more remote from common-sense opinions about sex and the body. In the paradigm of sex endocrinology, the essence of femininity and masculinity was […]

In the previous sections we have seen how in the decade from 1920 to 1930 the original concept of sex hormones was transformed with regard to the basic assumptions underlying the early conceptualization of sex hormones. The question that emerges from this is whether scientists still adhered to the concept of sex hormones. Did the […]

The dispute over the sexual specificity of sex hormones did not only address the origin of sex hormones. In the 1920s, the function of “hetero-sexual” hormones was also frequently discussed. If female sex hormones were present in males, should the concept of an exclusively sex-specific function of sex hormones then be reconsidered as well? Scientists […]

Confronted with these unexpected data, scientists started looking for a plausible theory to explain the source and identity of these “heterosexual hormones” (as female sex hormones in male organisms, and vice versa, were named) (Jongh 1934b: 1,209). In the 1930s, different hypotheses were proposed to explain the presence of female sex hormones in male organisms. […]

The first challenges to the prescientific idea of a sexual duality located in the gonads appeared in the early 1920s. In 1921, the Viennese gynecologist Otfried Fellner published an article in Pflueger’s Archiv describing experiments with rabbits in which extracts of the testis produced effects on the growth of the uterus similar to those produced […]

By 1910, the prescientific idea of the gonads as agents of sex differences had been transformed into the concept of sex hormones as chemical messengers of masculinity and femininity. With this conceptualization, sex endocrinologists reformulated the cultural notion of gonads as the seat of masculinity and femininity. Sex endocrinologists focussed their attention on the secretions […]

The first use of the term “hormone” can be traced back to Britain. In 1905, Ernest H. Starling, professor in physiology at University College in London, introduced the concept of hormones: These chemical messengers…or “hormones” as we may call them, have to be carried from the organ where they are produced to the organ which […]

Nowadays, we can hardly imagine a world without hormones. We have to travel in time to find other worlds that are not yet inhabited by them. Imagine a scene on a lazy Sunday afternoon in the late nineteenth century. Ladies are chattering about the exciting events of the past days. If we could eavesdrop on […]

Given this dominant status of the hormonally constructed concept of the body, I took up the challenge of uncovering the roots of the hormone story to see whether the image of “the hormonal woman” is only a current notion, or whether it had emerged already during the early years of sex endocrinology, as this area […]