Rejuvenation

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. It had been known since the eunuchs of Roman times that human potency is linked to the testicles,

but around 1900 it was thought that vitality was also linked to them. A Viennese physiologist, Eugen Steinach, assumed that ‘youth’ was a product of the puberty glands, the testicles, and wrote various books on the subject.

The testicular function in older people could lead to a second youth. It wasn’t really an original idea, since the celebrated physio­logist Edouard Brown-Sequard (1817-1894) had already aired the same notion. He was certainly not a quack. Far from it: in his heyday the Frenchman was famed for his pioneering work in endocrinology and neurophysiology. However, the scientist could not bear the thought that he was ageing, and at the age of 70, in a desperate attempt to regain his youth, he injected himself with an extract he had made from minced rams’ testicles. He immediately felt his skin tightening and firm­ing and his mind becoming more youthful and of course recommended everyone of his age to have a jab, but was laughed out of court by his fellow scientists for having treated himself and what’s more for pre­senting it as science.

In 1912 Steinach began his experiments with old rats. The crea­tures looked in poor shape, were thin and had lost their appetite for sex. Their seminal ducts were supposedly limp and empty, which made Steinbach decide to tie off their ducts and the accompanying draining blood vessels. He expected that this would result in the blood flow through the testicles increasing with a proportionate rise in testosterone production. Judging by the photos in his book, his male rats proved him right. They grew more hair, became more alert and aggressive, and their sexual interest also returned. If the treatment failed to produce the desired result, he implanted the testicles of other, young rats in the abdominal cavity or wall of the old animals and observed some degree of improvement. The rats lived twelve months longer than their usually allotted span of three years.

On і November the great moment came. An exhausted, emaciated Viennese workman (Anton W.) became the first human being to undergo the ligature of both seminal ducts. In the first two months after his operation there was little change, but shortly after that he improved

greatly. His appetite improved, he acquired more muscle bulk and was able to resume his work. This star witness of the rejuvenating operation walked the streets of Vienna as if reborn! Elderly gentlemen with suf­ficient funds soon found surgeons ready to perform the same procedure on them. In fact, some decades previously the Italian Francesco Parona had already reported on the injecting of veins. With a 30-year-old man who had been impotent all his life he injected a caustic substance into a kind of varicose vein on the penis. By the fifth day after the operation the patient had had sex five times!

Steinach was regarded as a charlatan by many of his colleagues, but in the meantime he had acquired Sigmund Freud as a patient. He himself was well aware of the limitations of his experiments, since the research field of ageing, impotence and possible hormonal effects was far too complex for one humble researcher. Others would continue his work.

In the same period Serge Voronoff began causing a stir with tes­ticle extracts. After various travels in Africa, this eccentric, flamboyant Russian became head of the then renowned experimental laboratory at the College de France. While working as a surgeon in Algiers he had become interested in the welfare of castrated boys, whom he found both mentally and physically retarded. Young patients with tuberculo­sis of their sex organs were mostly castrated at the time, and as a result, so Voronoff believed, after some years suffered loss of memory and poor concentration. In addition, he had never known a eunuch to live beyond 60. For this reason he formulated the hypothesis that the loss of the testicles accelerated the occurrence of signs of ageing. He was firmly convinced that old testicles needed support, but unfortunately
the Steinach operation had ultimately produced too few satisfied patients. What’s more, Voronoff had shown irrefutably by experiment that transplanting young testicles under the skin of the abdomen did not help either. Without an adequate blood supply the testicles soon failed. Vascular surgery was still in its infancy: nowadays blood vessels can if necessary be sewn together with the aid of a microscrope.

Voronoff therefore decided on a different approach from his Viennese colleague. He took testicular tissue, cut it into thin slices and placed it in the fleshy casing of the existing testicle, after first scratch­ing that casing with his scalpel, in the hope that this stimulus would cause new blood vessels to form, thus providing nutrition for the trans­plant. However, the most spectacular thing about his method was the donor. Whereas Steinach’s followers used the undescended testicles of young men, Voronoff favoured ape testicles.

In June 1920 he performed his first transplant, followed within a few years by three hundred others all over the world. By 1927 the figure had risen to over a thousand! Whether the transplant had taken could only be confirmed by microscopic examination. But who would sacri­fice his feeling of being ‘reborn’ for the sake of science? In 1923 the Russian had personally performed over forty operations, half of them on patients under the age of 60. Of course, these were not just any patients: they included professors, architects, writers and industrialists. For years they wrote letters about their young appearance and sexual potency! Predictably, Voronoff also transplanted testicles into homo­sexuals with the aim of ‘curing’ them. Like Steinach, Voronoff was scarcely taken seriously by official medicine, but this miracle-worker nevertheless became a worldwide celebrity among randy old men.

A contemporary Russian writer incorporated the theme of rejuve­nation and testicle transplantation into his work, but turning the process on its head, he imagined a transplant from man to animal. Mikhail Bulgakov (1890-1940) studied medicine and worked for a short time as a village doctor. His only literary work published in full in the former Soviet Union during his lifetime is a collection of satiri­cal stories, Heart of a Dog. In one of them a professor, who has more or less managed to escape the dictatorship of the proletariat, is work­ing on rejuvenation experiments. He implants the testicles and pineal gland of a recently deceased, disreputable musician into a dog. The dog gradually turns into a loud, foul-mouthed human being. What’s more, he becomes close friends with the fanatical chairman of the residents’ committee, who is determined to destroy the professor and his pros­perity. Under the influence of the fanatical chairman the dog becomes increasingly disobedient to its creator. The professor realizes his error and returns the dog to its original state. In this way he intends to rescue

mankind from monsters like the doggish proletarian with his Marxist — Leninist pronouncements. The story is full of both science fiction and satire, and the indirect critique of Bolshevism is quite obvious.

The French doctor Denis Courtade believed, like many contempo­raries, that application of all kinds of electricity — faradic or galvanic — to different parts of the body — head, sacrum, lumbar vertebrae — could cure impotence. In cases of impotence through inflammation of the prostate an internal rectal electrode was inserted. The next step was application of diathermia to the testicles. By raising the temperature of the testes slightly it was hoped to boost the secretion of testosterone, and a special chair had been designed for the purpose. A hole at the front of a glass allowed the scrotum to be suspended in a saline solu­tion, after which electrical stimulation could begin. The treatment was given three or four times a week for a month. That was enough: even then it was known that a long-term rise in temperature could lead to a reduction in sperm production.

Developments in America were almost identical to those in Europe. There too the tying off of the arteries of the scrotum was the first surgical treatment for impotence. The surgeon James Duncan published on the subject in March 1895. A 66-year-old impotent widower, who had found Spanish fly ineffective, was the first victim. The operation took place under local anaesthetic (cocaine). Duncan’s fellow surgeon

Wooten performed a similar operation in 1902 and wrote a verbose article about it. In 1908 the urologist Professor Lydston stated that the positive results were due to the relative impedence of drainage and the resulting enlarged testicles: ‘The larger the testicles are after the oper­ation, the more impressed the patient is. He believes that the operation has been successful and his self-confidence returns. The positive results turn out to be mostly lasting, even after complications have developed in the long term’, wrote the professor from Illinois. Despite his opti­mistic pronouncements, however, the operation was soon forgotten. The fact was that the long-term outcomes were dire. Nevertheless Lowsley continued the treatment until 1953, operating on thousands of men.

A certain Professor Lespinasse, though, managed to transplant tes­ticular tissue from recently deceased men into the abdominal muscles of living impotent men. Whenever anyone had committed suicide or been executed, Lespinasse was on the scene in a flash to remove the testicles. Meanwhile the impotent recipient of the donor tissue was prepared for operation by his assistants. Unfortunately the transplant was invariably rejected. Up to now there have been very few success­ful attempts to transplant a testicle stalk and all. In every case the trans­plantation involved monozygotic twins, one of whom had no testicles and the other two.

A young prison doctor in San Quentin named Leo Stanley had an easier time in 1918. He implanted the testes of executed inmates into prisoners in various age groups to see if in this way he could effectively treat acne and asthma. His test subjects, though, received no remission of sentence.