FIG. 16: The goat gonad doctor, John R. Brinkley. © KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
His first patient was an elderly farmer who complained of a low sex drive and was willing for Brinkley to try inserting a portion of goat gonads into his scrotum. Most individuals would be appalled at the notion of deliberately inserting animal tissue into their body, as opposed to their stomach, but when it comes to sex and ageing, human history is full of bizarre practices believed to enhance, improve, and prolong the sexual experience. By all accounts, Brinkley’s farmer not only survived the operation but also enjoyed a renewed lease on sexual life, fathering a son whom he decided to name, appropriately, Billy. John Brinkley’s meteoric rise to fame and wealth had begun. He would go on to perform thousands of such operations at around $750 a pop, and he became one of the most successful quacks in twentieth-century America. For $5,000, which was a huge amount back then, Brinkley transplanted human gonads harvested from young prisoners on death row. Over his lifetime, he would own mansions, planes, boats, and radio stations and stand twice for the governorship of Kansas. He even wore a ‘goatee’ beard to fit with his medical procedure. Eventually, the American Medical Association, frustrated at the extent and success of his goat gonad transplants, ran Brinkley out of the country, and he would eventually lose his fortune trying to re-establish his career abroad.
The notion that animal sexual glands would work as an elixir of life had been around for some time. In nineteenth-century Paris, the ageing Harvard physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard had been making claims of rejuvenation from injecting himself with crushed guinea-pig and puppy testicles. Ouch, it makes me wince just to type this. Probably the most famous gonad doctor of the time was the Russian-born physician Serge Voronoff. He injected himself with Brown-Séquard’s liquidized pet bollocks, but with disappointing results. Voronoff then thought that perhaps the tissue should remain intact, so he perfected the transplantation or graft technique. Initially, he used the family jewels of young criminals and transplanted them straight into the sagging sacks of ageing millionaires who could afford the operation. When he ran out of obliging youthful crooks, he moved on to various monkeys and apes. World leaders, captains of industry, and ageing actors all paid handsomely for operations, and soon animal gonad grafting was taking place all over the Western world, except in England. The English, being strong pet lovers, had banned animal vivisection but deemed it perfectly acceptable to transplant another man’s bollocks.
Unlike Brinkley in the United States, Voronoff enjoyed the accolades of his fellow doctors in Europe for a period of time. In July 1923, The Times reported that at a meeting of seven hundred leading surgeons at the International Congress of Surgeons in London, Voronoff was applauded for developing the rejuvenation operaton that would make him a fortune substantial enough to afford an entourage of servants and mistresses.39 However, as with Brinkley, eventually the tide of support changed when it became clear that Voronoff ’s claims could not be substantiated.
Although Voronoff ’s reputation was eventually destroyed, aspects of his research were sound. The testes produce the steroid hormone testosterone, which is an essential mechanism for the masculinization of males. In the womb, testosterone turns girl babies into boy babies. Without it, all boys would turn out to be little girls. That’s why we all have nipples. Over the course of the lifetime, testosterone plays a role in the so-called secondary sexual characteristics that appear around puberty with the change in the genitals, body mass, and hair. In old age, testosterone levels become depleted. Among other symptoms of old age, lowered testosterone can reduce the sexual libido, and so hormone replacement therapy is one controversial treatment for the so-called male menopause. It also forms part of the transitional female-to-male gender reassignment in women who want to be surgically transformed into men. However, in its modern use, synthetic manufactured hormones are used to avoid both the problem of rejection of animal tissues by the human immune system and the risk of transmitting animal disease into humans.
It was this risk that brought Voronoff out of his relative obscurity in 1999 when an article published in the science journal Nature theorized that his early gonad transplantations to rejuvenate the limp libidos of old wealthy men had inadvertently transmitted the deadly virus HIV from monkeys to man.40 How ironic if true. Once again, the animals get their revenge on their superstitious tormentors.
Under normal circumstances, the cells from one animal cannot replace the cells of another. Even human-to-human transplantation requires compatibility and drugs to suppress the body’s natural immune defense to reject foreign invasion. The fact that gonad injections and transplantations seemed to work was due to the placebo belief that they would work. Although the logic behind the gonad doctors’ treatments was essentialist in nature, it would ultimately lead to the discovery of the underlying mechanism of the yet-unknown hormones. When Voronoff observed the effects of castration on men and animals, he saw how the absence produced an imbalance. He simply reasoned that replacing what was missing in an old man would redress the problem. A naive conception based on the sympathetic laws of magic led to a scientific reality.
HOLY WATER
When Charles I, the British king, was beheaded on a cold January morning in 1649, it was reported that the crowd surged forward to dip handkerchiefs into the royal blood as it dripped from the scaffold.41 If true, one possible explanation for this grisly reaction may have been the belief that royal blood had curative powers because kings and queens had a direct connection with God. Certainly, the ‘royal touch’ of a king or queen was thought to cure the skin disorder scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. Essential adoration of saints and kings continues to this day.
The most visited site in the Italian province of Umbria is the fortified medieval town of Assisi, home to the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, where the remains of Italy’s most famous saint, St Francis of Assisi, can be found. The tomb of this thirteenth-century saint was not discovered until 1818, which is surprising considering that these were the remains of the individual responsible for the formation of the Franciscan order of monks. The original tomb had been concealed by a fifteenth-century pope, but when the mortal remains were rediscovered following nineteenth-century excavations, they were moved to the underground crypt that pilgrims can now visit today. On the day I was there, the temperature was a searing ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit outside in the blazing Tuscan sun, so, despite the hundreds of visitors crammed into the basilica, it was a welcome relief to file slowly into the cool underground crypt and shuffle past and around the large stone sarcophagus protected by a lattice iron frame.
The numbers were such that one had to simply go with the silent majority. There was no turning back. Whenever a whisper emerged in the crowd, a disembodied voice from some unseen church authority reprimanded and commanded us with a stern ‘Silenzio’. We were expected to maintain a reverential state. However, just as museums tell us, ‘Please do not touch’, it was understandable why visitors wanted to poke their hands through the iron grid to make physical contact with the ancient stone monument behind. Some were engaged in silent prayer as they touched the stone.
It was then that I witnessed something quite disturbing and essentialist in nature. A monk came in and watered the permanent flower arrangements at the front of the tomb. The water from the flowers started to trickle over the ancient stone. What I did not expect, and could not photograph because of the restrictions, was a sudden frenzy in those nearest to this part of the tomb. As if they had been parched beyond thirst by a desert sun, they pressed their faces against the grid trying to lick the water as it dribbled over the Holy Shrine. Fingers wetted by the excess water were licked in an effort to imbibe some of the vital fluid. Water that was probably drawn from an ordinary tap from the municipal supply only minutes earlier had become sacred by contact with the tomb. It was all too bizarre. Admiration and adoration had become essential contamination of ordinary water.