While Voronoff escaped such a fate, by the closing years of the 1920s, the once great surgeon was attracting more mockery than praise. In 1928, shortly before Voronoff’s lecture series in London, George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to the London Daily News from the perspective of a monkey:
We apes are a patient and kindly race, but this is more than we can stand. Has any ape ever torn the glands from a living man to graft them upon another ape for the sake of a brief and unnatural extension of that ape’s life?… Man remains what he has always been; the cruellest of animals. Let him presume no further on his grotesque resemblance to us; he will remain what he is in spite of all of Dr Voronoff’s efforts to make a respectable ape of him.
By 1929, Voronoff claimed to have carried out almost five hundred gland transplants, but he had lost credibility with the public and his peers. Not only was new research disproving his theories, but his patients continued to age, deteriorate and die. Eventually, Voronoff’s name faded from the press, his work was widely condemned, and he was painted as just another quack. Voronoff and his theories may be long gone, but in one final disturbing twist, it has been suggested that the vogue for transplanting monkey tissue into humans may have been responsible for transferring simian immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) from apes to humans, leading to the global AIDS crisis today.{18}
Voronoff may have been one of the most notorious surgeons mangling scrotums in the quest for eternal youth, but he certainly wasn’t the only one.[20] Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach (1861–1944) believed that a bilateral vasectomy (tying the tubes of both testicles), would act like a kind of plug to keep semen in the body, which would boost a flagging sex drive. After experimenting on rats, Steinach refined his technique and moved on to human subjects. Steinach claimed his early experiments not only cured impotence, but his patients were younger, ‘more buoyant and alive’.{19} Patients before the operation were described as being ‘subject to paralysing fatigue, disclination to work, failing memory, indifference and depression; all of which hinder or preclude progress and every kind of competition’, and, of course, they were ‘impotent’.{20} The promise of eternal youth and a raging ‘hard-on’ (1864) are extremely seductive, and it’s little wonder the public responded to Steinach’s work so enthusiastically.
Word of the ‘Steinach operation’ soon spread and physicians such as Harry Benjamin, Robert Lichtenstern, Victor Blum and Norman Haire set up their own clinics and started twisting the ‘nuts’ (1704) of men across Europe and America. But not everyone was convinced surgical rejuvenation worked. In 1924, an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association denounced surgical rejuvenation as open to ‘abuse and fantastic exploitation’ and scorned those who ‘are willing to grasp at such new suggestions towards accomplishing an invigorating end’.{21} But this didn’t stop several high-profile figures from going under the knife.
Sigmund Freud was reported to have undergone a vasectomy at the hands of Dr Victor Blum in 1923 to try and cure him of cancer.{22} The Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) went to Dr Norman Haire in London for a bilateral vasectomy to try and boost his libido and the quality of his work. Shortly after the procedure, Yeats wrote to a friend that he now felt ‘marvellously strong, with a sense of the future’.{23} However, Ethel Mannin, who had a brief relationship with Yeats after the operation, later pronounced the Steinach operation a ‘failure’.{24} Ouch.
Failure or not, in the first half of the twentieth century, glands were big business. Newspapers reported huge consignments of rhesus monkeys being transported to Australia to ‘meet the demands of patients for rejuvenation operations’.{25} In 1924, Dr William Bailey, director of the American Endocrine Laboratories, outlined seven possible methods for surgical rejuvenation to the American Chemical Society:
1. Transplantation of a gland from one position to another.
2. Grafting portions of animal glands to human ones (Voronoff’s methods).
3. Cutting and binding the gland-ducts or vasoligature (Steinach’s operation).
4. Application of X-rays.
5. Use of radium emanations, or gamma rays.
6. ‘Drugging’ the gland with iodine or alcohol.
7. ‘Diathermia’, or the application of heat through high-frequency electricity.{26}
There was no shortage of surgeons who were willing to subject men’s ‘tallywags’ (1680) to all manner of quackery, but the Holy Grail (and most expensive) of the gland treatments was the transplant. Men feeling their youth slip away desperately clambered to get their hands on a pair of springy young gonads, through legal means, or not. The extent that some were willing to go to was laid bare in 1922.
On a bright summer morning in Chicago, in 1922, a man in his early thirties was found unconscious in a doorway at the corner of Ranch Avenue and Adam Street. Unable to rouse him, concerned residents took the man to the local country hospital where he was soon identified as Henry Johnson, an electrical employee who lived with his sister, Beryl Heiber. Johnson was examined by one of the hospital’s surgical interns who discovered that both Johnson’s testicles had been removed from the scrotal sack, and that the wound had been cleaned with antiseptic and ‘expertly’ stitched closed. Johnson recalled he had been drinking with a friend on Madison Street the night before. His last memory was getting into a streetcar to go home, and after that, everything was blank. Surgeons treating Johnson at the time believed he had been drugged prior to the attacks, and noted the level of surgical skill required to excise a man’s testicles without severing the testicular artery. Johnson was too embarrassed to report this to the police, and instead went home and returned to work.
Four months later in October, thirty-four-year-old Polish labourer Joseph Wozniak awoke lying in a vacant lot, with little recollection of how he came to be there. Wozniak had been out drinking with his friend Kuchnisky in Milwaukee Avenue, and the last thing he recalled was hailing a taxicab to go home. His head ached, he felt disorientated and he had a strong chemical taste in his mouth. Wozniak managed to stagger home to Seventeenth Street in the north of Chicago. A severe pain in his groin had grown steadily worse throughout the day until Wozniak admitted himself to hospital to be treated by Dr Sampolinski, who discovered that Wozniak’s testicles had also been removed. The strong chemical taste Wozniak had in his mouth was chloroform.
Shocked, Dr Sampolinski called the police, and as soon as the media picked up the story, Joseph Wozniak was reported around the world as a victim of ‘gland larceny’. Wozniak’s drinking buddy Kuchnisky was missing, and police believed he must have suffered a similar fate to his friend, but was too embarrassed to come forward and had gone into hiding. Upon reading about the Wozniak case in the papers, Henry Johnson came forward to report his attack. It quickly became apparent that not only were these cases linked, but they were most likely carried out by a surgeon.
20
Other physicians working in gland and rejuvenation surgery included Victor Darwin Lespinasse (1878–1946), George Frank Lydston (1858–1923) and Leo Leonidas Stanley (1886–1976).