Benjamin soon became the leading proponent of the “Steinach operation” in America. Steinach’s researches with animals had convinced him that vasoligation, or the severing of the vas deferens (spermatic duct) in men—an operation that is today called vasectomy—resulted in an almost miraculous “rejuvenation” of aging mammals. Steinach’s senile animal subjects grew glossy new coats of hair, gained weight and muscle, and regained the strength and endurance characteristic of much younger animals. Encouraged by these findings, other physicians began to perform vasoligation in humans, and the surgery was soon being touted as a treatment not only for the lassitude of old age, but also for age-related diseases such as cancer and atherosclerosis. It appeared that the gonads were the seat not only of sexual identity and virility, but also of overall health and vigor. “They were trying to find sex hormones,” says Christine Wheeler, “but they were also looking for the fountain of youth.”
Many men of the era, celebrated and unknown, underwent the Steinach operation, hoping to stave off the physical and psychological effects of old age. Indeed, when Harry Benjamin met Sigmund Freud (through a referral from Steinach), Freud admitted that he, too, had undergone the Steinach operation, and felt that “his general health and vitality had improved,” and that “the malignant growth of his jaw had been favorably influenced. ‘Don’t talk about it as long as I am alive,’ he said to me on parting. I told him I would not and I kept my promise,” Benjamin said in 1969. Freud’s unwillingness to publicize his surgery points to its somewhat unsavory reputation even in the days of his greatest success. Nonetheless, throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, Steinach’s disciples and colleagues performed the procedure on their aging male patients and gathered data that appeared to confirm its efficacy.
Harry Benjamin, whose New York medical practice focused mainly on geriatrics, was the most enthusiastic proponent of the method in the United States. He contributed the introduction and a number of case studies to Paul Kammerer’s 1923 study, Rejuvenation and the Prolongation of Human Efficiency, and arranged for a showing of the “Steinach Film,” a silent documentary on Steinach’s hormonal research, at the New York Academy of Medicine in 1923. “Broadly speaking, the Steinach Operation strengthens the endocrine system,” Benjamin writes in the introduction to Kammerer’s book. “On account of the inter-relationship of the different glands with an internal secretion and the influence these glands have over the nervous system, the strengthening of the glandular system will result in a re-energizing of the physical and mental capacities. Naturally such a strengthening should be resorted to if a glandular weakness or inferiority exists.”
Benjamin’s interest in the rejuvenation of aging patients was closely connected to interest in sexology, as both disciplines were at that time based in endocrinology. Soon after he started his gerontology practice, Benjamin began meeting with “a handful of physicians in New York, all of whom were deeply interested in aging,” says Benjamin’s colleague, Christine Wheeler. “They called themselves the Wednesday Night Group,” and they discussed what was going on in the world of sexology. They called this interest “sex physiology.” This study group, which began meeting in 1916, “explored the possible function and meaning of the ductless [glands], or endocrine glands, a full ten years before the Journal of the American Medical Association published its first article on the use of thyroid hormone,” Benjamin’s colleague Charles Ihlenfeld pointed out at a symposium on gender identity in 1975. A decade later, Benjamin, who worked as a consulting endocrinologist at the City College of New York in the thirties, “helped arrange financial support for Funk and Harrow who succeeded in the first isolation from human urine of a biologically active androgen,” Ihlenfeld said.
According to Benjamin’s protegee, Leah Cahan Schaefer, “Harry believed that the urine of young men might contain testosterone and he persuaded a professor friend at City College to collect the urine of his students. Subsequently, Casimir Funk developed the first sex hormones from the urine of young men. With the androsterone that Funk collected and produced, Harry Benjamin, once again at the forefront of scientific investigation, gave himself the first hormone injection. Funk almost fainted, but the only reaction on Harry was a terribly sore and bruised area where the injection had been made, due to the impurity of the new substance.”
Like his mentors Hirschfeld and Steinach, Benjamin believed “that you couldn’t separate the body from the mind,” says Christine Wheeler. “He believed in the effects of hormones on behavior and motivation.”
The effects of hormones were also very much on the mind of another New Yorker at that time. In 1948—the year that Harry Benjamin met his first transsexual patient—George Jorgensen, Jr., enrolled at the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistants School, in New York City. Frustrated by his inability to understand the French and German medical treatises on “hermaphrodism” and “pseudo-hermaphrodism” he found in the library at the New York Academy of Medicine, Jorgensen stubbornly sought another route to self-understanding. “Still determined to find some cure or satisfactory compromise for what I considered an emotional and sexual disorder, I enrolled at the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistants School,” Christine Jorgensen wrote in 1967. At the school, Jorgensen learned to perform chemical analyses of blood and urine, and studied the principles of basal metabolism.
“However, it was the rare glandular disturbances which intrigued me more. Abnormal growth due to pituitary malfunction, steroids, enzymes, and sex hormones were all new areas of knowledge, but ones which I felt had some bearing on my own problem. Avidly, I discussed glands and glandular disturbances with the doctors who were my instructors,” Jorgensen writes. “These studies occupied my every waking moment, and probably many of my sleeping ones to become an all-consuming drive.”
Shortly after beginning studies at the school, Jorgensen received another in a series of propositions from gay men, in this case a Danish sailor, at a dance. Disturbed and confused by the desire he inspired in gay men, the student of medical technology turned for comfort to Paul de Kruif’s book, The Male Hormone, which points out that the chemical difference between testosterone and estradiol is merely a matter of four atoms of hydrogen and one atom of carbon. “If Dr. de Kruif’s chemical ratio was correct, it would seem then that the relationship was very close,” Jorgensen writes in her autobiography. “That being so, I reasoned, there must be times when one could be so close to that physical dividing line that it would be difficult to determine on which side of the male-female dividing line one belonged.” Jorgensen decided that she belonged on the female side, and a few days later she walked into a pharmacy “in an unfamiliar part of town” and requested a hundred tablets of high-potency estradiol. At first, the clerk was unwilling to hand over the hundred tablets of ethynyl estradiol without a prescription, but when Jorgensen claimed to be a medical technology student “working on the idea of growth stimulation in animals through the use of hormones,” the clerk relented. “Once out of the store, I headed for the car and unwrapped the package,” Jorgensen writes. “How strange it seemed to me that the whole answer might lie in the particular combination of atoms contained in those tiny, aspirinlike pills.”