It is well known that seminal losses, arising from any cause, produce a mental and physical debility which is in proportion to their frequency. These facts, and many others, have led to the generally-admitted view that in the seminal fluid, as secreted by the testicles, a substance or several substances exist which, entering the blood by resorption, have a most essential use in giving strength to the nervous system and to other parts.{2}
Convinced the ageing process could be reversed by boosting semen in the body, Brown-Séquard started to experiment on animals, trying to graft parts of guinea pigs into male dogs, and injecting ageing rabbits with the blood or semen taken from the testicles of younger rabbits, that kind of thing.{3} Convinced all this seminal swapping was having a positive effect on his subjects, Brown-Séquard began injecting himself with a mixture of blood, semen and ‘juice extracted from testicles’ of dogs and guinea pigs.
To the three kinds of substances I have just named I added distilled water in a quantity which never exceeded three or four times their volume. The crushing was always done after the addition of water. When filtered through a paper filter the liquid was of a reddish hue, and rather opaque… For each injection I have used nearly one cubic centimeter of the filtered liquid.{4}
Immediately after these injections, Brown-Séquard reported being able to work for longer hours, experienced an increase in mental focus, and, at the age of seventy-two, could run up and down stairs again. Brown-Séquard published his findings in The Lancet, and legitimised organotherapy as a credible medical discipline.{5}
Brown-Séquard may have been an early pioneer, but the man responsible for making surgical rejuvenation mainstream was the Russian-born French surgeon Serge Voronoff (1866–1951). Voronoff was a laboratory director at the prestigious Collège de France when he made his name implanting monkey testicles into men who complained they were not as sprightly as they used to be. An expert manipulator of the press, Voronoff’s work became the subject of intense media focus around the world.
Before turning his full attention to monkey ‘bollocks’ (1000), Voronoff was a respected gynaecologist and had pioneered new surgical techniques in Les Feuillets de Chirurgie et de Gynecologie (1910). Influenced by the work of Brown-Séquard, Voronoff began experimenting on animals to see if grafting testicle glands from one animal into the body of another held rejuvenating properties. Convinced that it did, Voronoff presented his findings to the French Surgical Congress in 1919. Le Petit Parisien reported his findings the next day.
Doctor Serge Voronoff, director of the physiology laboratory at the Collège de France, offered a stunning communication to the surgical congress yesterday. He claims to have rejuvenated and reinvigorated aging goats and rams by grafting an interstitial gland taken from one of their own species… The entire human race will benefit from the success of Mr Voronoff’s projects, since he is working hard to obtain similarly successful results while operating on aging men by grafting the interstitial gland of a monkey. It does not matter what glands these might be. If their introduction, through the scalpel of Doctor Voronoff, can give our tired organisms youth and vigour, then long live interstitial glands.{6}
After repeating his experiment hundreds of times on sheep, dogs and bulls, in 1920 Voronoff began transplanting monkey glands into humans. He had originally wanted to use human testicles, taken from corpses and criminals, but soon realised he would never be able to secure a regular supply, so monkey nuts it was. Eventually, Voronoff had to buy a monkey colony near Nice to keep up with demand.{7}
The procedure was as simple as it was horrific. The chimp’s testicle would be removed and finely cut into longitudinal segments. An incision was then made into the patient’s scrotum to expose the testicles and membranes. The cut-up chimp testes were implanted underneath the tunica vaginalis membrane, and the incision was sewn back up. The theory was that the monkey glands would be absorbed directly into the patient’s own sex glands. The monkey was euthanised.
Voronoff knew the value of customer testimonials, and in his 1924 book, Forty-Three Grafts From Monkey to Man, he meticulously detailed his many successes, including a seventy-four-year-old Englishman, Arthur Liardet. Voronoff grafted a baboon’s ‘bobble’ (1889) into Arthur Liardet in 1921 and declared, ‘his man has truly been rejuvenated by 15 or 20 years. Physical state, genital vitality, all has radically changed from the results of the testicular transplant that transformed a senile old man, powerless and pitiful, into a vigorous man with all his capacities.’{8} Despite being transformed ‘from tottering old age to the activity of a man in the prime of life’, Liardet died just two years later.{9} Undeterred, in his 1925 book, Rejuvenation by Grafting, Voronoff declared that his ageing patients appeared fifteen years younger, and common ailments such as constipation, cramps, fatigue and colitis were all hugely improved. In cases of depression, post-surgery patients appeared to be ‘more alert, displayed increased vigour, jovial eyes, and had more energy’.{10} Of course, one of the most commonly cited ailments Voronoff claimed to be able to cure was impotency and a lack of libido. One sixty-seven-year-old post-operative patient claimed that his sexual libido had returned to an ‘extraordinary degree’.{11}
Despite Voronoff’s confidence, the scientific community were less and less convinced that sewing monkey balls into an old man’s scrotum was a good thing. Scientists began trying to replicate Voronoff’s remarkable success and couldn’t. French veterinary surgeon Henri Velu experimented with testicular grafting on sheep to try and improve their health, but found this only resulted in grumpy sheep. He presented his findings before the French Veterinary Academy in 1929 where he called Voronoff ‘delusional’. Similar studies in Australia and Germany also found gland grafting produced no positive effects.{12} To make matters worse, Voronoff was denied a licence to operate in Britain on grounds of animal cruelty. Leading anti-vivisectionists in the UK denounced Voronoff as ‘an offence against morality, hygiene, and decency’.{13}
But at least Voronoff was an established medical surgeon, which is more than could be said for the American John Richard Brinkley (1885–1942), who started grafting goat testicles into human subjects armed only with a bought medical diploma and a can-do attitude.{14} Brinkley became known as the ‘goat gland doctor’, and made a great deal of money from convincing men he could restore their erection with a billy goat’s scruff. Inspired by the work of rejuvenists like Voronoff, Brinkley operated on hundreds of people (men and women) and given he really didn’t have the qualifications to be doing so, infections were common, and a number of patients died. Between 1930 and 1941, Brinkley was sued more than a dozen times for the wrongful death of a patient in his care.{15} Eventually, Brinkley was exposed in court as a ‘charlatan and a quack in the ordinary, well-understood meaning of those words’, and was subsequently ruined by an avalanche of lawsuits.{16} He declared bankruptcy in 1941, and died in poverty the following year.