The story of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and equally unwittingly married his mother, is widely known. This led Sigmund Freud to use Oedipus’ name for a discovery he made in his consulting room concerning the human subconscious. Freud sees the Oedipal phase as commencing when the child is between three and five. He […]

Melampus means ‘black-foot’. His feet were black because although his mother had placed him in the shade shortly after his birth, she had carelessly left his feet exposed to the sunlight. From an early age Melampus was fond of all animals. In front of his father’s house was a large oak and a hollow at […]

Today, when most people hear the word ‘eunuch’, their first associa­tions are with weakness, sexual impotence, inadequacy as a man, etc. That has definitely not been the case throughout history. To judge by the alarmed reaction to the very word, you’d never think that castra­tion was once a popular practice. But it was: for centuries […]

Testosterone production in women, as in men, is variable in several respects. Just after birth girls produce relatively large amounts of testos­terone. Production declines throughout childhood and increases again with the onset of puberty. Testosterone levels peak around the age of 30, after which there is a steady decline. Women of around forty pro­duce only […]

The concentration of testosterone is many times greater in the testes than in serum. Unlike in other androgen-dependent organs, such as the prostate and seminal glands, a multiple of the serum concentration in the testes is also necessary for normal functioning (spermatogenesis). Grateful use is made of this phenomenon in research into a male contra­ceptive. […]

Testosterone was one of the first performance-enhancing drugs to be used in sport. In combination with strength training it is a powerful muscle strengthener, an anabolic. When scientists succeeded in manu­facturing the hormone synthetically it fairly soon became all the rage among sportsmen. But not only sportsmen: Adolf Hitler and other top Nazi leaders became […]

For decades the reduction of sex hormones in post-menopausal women has been the subject of study and for decades women presenting with associated problems have been treated with female hormones. Nowa­days a deficiency of active androgens like testosterone in men is known not as andropause but as padam, or Partial Androgen Deficiency in the Ageing […]

Men of sixty are often determined to prove their masculinity, basically because they have very little left. The pious King David in the Bible was no exception, when from his roof terrace he saw Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of his bravest and most loyal commanders, taking a bath (ii Samuel 11:2). In a […]

American doctors performed many other odd experiments. The book The Male Hormone tells the story of Professor Fred Koch and his student Lemuel McGee, both employed at the University of Chicago. They cheerfully mashed, extracted, fractionized and distilled thousands of kilograms of bulls’ testicles, in search of the pure male sex hormone. From 40 kg […]

Around 1900 average life expectancy increased. This was mainly due to better nutrition and hygiene. More and more people lived into middle age and beyond. Rather in the same way as in our own time, many people at the turn of the twentieth century felt the need to com­bat the decline that accompanies old age. […]