by Lydia Kang
But it is no wonder that humans have looked to themselves—literally—to cure everything gone wrong. The desperate search to find health sometimes brings the best—and the worst—out of humanity.
21
Animal-Derived Medicines
Of the Original Snake Oil Salesman, Ox Brains, and All Sorts of Testicles
In all the hustle and bustle of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a place where John Philip Sousa’s band played nightly, the first electric kitchen was on display, and Pabst Blue Ribbon made its debut, Clark Stanley needed to make an impression.
Dressed to the nines in a showy, frontiersman fashion, Stanley stood on a stage in front of the massing crowd and reached into a sack at his feet. He pulled out a rattlesnake, showing the audience its writhing, venomous body, then deftly slit the snake open with his knife and plunged it into a vat of boiling water behind him. As the snake fat rose to the surface, Stanley skimmed it off, mixed it into previously prepared liniment jars, and sold it to the crowd as “Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment.”
The crowd in attendance for Stanley’s debut at the fair were probably the only purchasers of his snake oil—and there would be thousands over the coming years—who actually had snake parts in their product. Stanley’s liniment, as federal investigators would discover twenty-four years later, typically contained a lot less snake. As in none at all.
The official inquiry finally revealed the contents: mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper, and turpentine. Although that was good news for rattlesnakes, it was bad news for Stanley’s many consumers, who had been duped by the world’s first snake oil salesman.
In 1897, Stanley published an autobiography that was part self-mythology, part cowboy poetry, and part advertisement promoting his own snake oil. In The Life and Adventures of the American Cowboy: Life in the Far West, Stanley claimed to have learned of the great and mysterious healing powers of snake oil from the Hopi tribe.
Although it’s a masterful origin story for Stanley, the self-dubbed “Rattlesnake King,” the truth was more complicated.
During the wave of Chinese immigration to the American West in the 1800s, Americans were alternately repelled and intrigued by traditional Chinese medicinal practices. Snake oil was a popular, and legitimate, topical medicine used by Chinese laborers to relieve pain, reduce inflammation, and treat arthritis and bursitis. Chinese snake oil, made with the fat of Chinese water snakes—high in omega-3 fatty acids—was actually an effective anti-inflammatory.
But the problem with Chinese water snakes is they all live in China. So, once you run out of the snake oil you brought with you across the Pacific Ocean, what do you do next? You look for a local snake. And if you’re anywhere west of the Rockies, that local snake is likely to have a rattle on its tail.
Rattlesnakes, unfortunately, contain much less beneficial fatty acids, about three times less than your average Chinese water snake. So snake oil made from rattlesnakes was not nearly as effective.
What was even less effective, however, was Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment because it contained no snake oil at all. It didn’t matter. The “Rattlesnake King” was a master at self-promotion (when a reporter visited him in Massachusetts, he made sure to have his office filled with snakes, crawling all over the room and even up his arms), and he went happily about his business for two decades, making a tidy fortune. He even saw a good eleven years in operation after the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 began putting many of his quack colleagues out of business. The feds didn’t catch up with Stanley until 1917, when they seized a shipment of his snake oil liniment, analyzed the contents, and issued their damning report.
Stanley was charged a whopping $20 fine for violating the Pure Food and Drug Act by “misbranding” his product.
He paid the fee, shrugged his shoulders, and slipped out of the pages of history a wealthy man.
Insane in the Membrane, Insane in the Ox Brain
Stanley was hardly the first quack to reach for the nearest animal, gut it, and advertise its contents as a panacea. Over the past few millennia, for both legitimate and illegitimate medical purposes, we’ve been crushing, testing, butchering, and torturing animals. This process of using animal products in medicine is called “zootherapy,” but it’s no trip to the zoo. Occasionally, animal research has led to significant, even crucial, discoveries. The fruit fly played a critical role in Thomas Hunt Morgan’s early studies of genetics, Ivan Pavlov demonstrated the relationship between sense stimulation and body functions with his dogs, and Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine from cows (and promptly coined the term vaccination from the Latin vacca for “cow”). We’ve also employed animals to aid our own healing processes: Leeches, for example (see Leeches, page 211), were for many years considered an important weapon in the medicinal arsenal, snails have long been effective at healing burns, spiderwebs can be used to bind a wound, and, even today, maggots are used to clean out wounds.
But for every cow that helped humanity avoid smallpox, a few thousand died in the name of quackery. For example, take this prescription for insanity from the Renaissance era:
Bake a loaf of bread, then remove the inner part and replace with an ox brain. Bind this ox-brain-filled bread to the patient’s head. Insanity cured.
Yep, that ox just died so a mentally ill person could put its brain on his head.
The bit of sympathetic magic on display here (i.e., put the sedate brain of an ox near the unwell brain of a person) steered many animals toward untimely deaths, while simultaneously not working at all on the humans they were trying to cure.
Nevertheless, we have maintained a stubborn belief throughout the centuries in the power of sympathetic magic to overcome our medical trials. If the animal is strong, it will pass its strength on to us. If the animal is wise, it will pass its wisdom on to us.
And if the animal is virile, it will pass its virility on to us. And what’s the most virile part of a virile animal?
Why, the testicles of course.
A Tale of Two Testes
“Do you wish to continue as a sexual flat tire?” asked advertisements in the 1930s. If not, turn to “Doctor” John Romulus Brinkley, who offered a particularly jaw-dropping solution to the age-old problem of male impotence. Brinkley—against all manner of reason and logic—convinced an embarrassingly large number of men that all they needed to restore their male virility was a new set of testicles. Goat testicles, to be exact.
Brinkley cut open the man’s testicle sac, implanted slivers of goat testicles, then sewed the patient back up again. And so sexual flat tires were pumped back up and Brinkley became a multimillionaire.
The American quack was following on the heels of Serge Voronoff, a Russian-born physician practicing in France and Egypt in the early part of the twentieth century. Voronoff became convinced early in his medical career that the aging process was sped along by decreased hormonal activity. If instead you could increase hormone production, or rejuvenate aging glands, perhaps you could reverse the aging process.
At the relatively young age of thirty-three, Voronoff, in a valiant display of self-experimentation, injected himself with the ground-up testicles of castrated dogs and guinea pigs to see if it would halt his own aging process. It didn’t.
Despite the complete lack of success, the experiment somehow convinced Voronoff the principle was sound. So, beginning in 1913, the physician turned to the ape family, transplanting the testicles from a baboon into the aging scrotum of a seventy-four-year-old man.
To be fair, Voronoff didn’t actually overload the poor man’s scrotum with full-size baboon testicles. Aware that such a surgery would invariably lead to the human body rejecting the foreign material, the physician came up with a more restrained strategy. He transplanted “slithers” of baboon testicles that measured two centimeters by half a centimeter. The thin slithers could thereby be absorbed by the human tissue, he reasoned, and the rejuvenation process could begin. The absorption part is true, the rejuvenation proc
ess … less so. The tissue died and the medical results were nonexistent. The placebo effect, however, was powerful.
Voronoff labeled the operation a success, and some seven hundred physicians present at London’s International Congress of Surgeons in 1923 “oohed” and “ahhed” when Voronoff presented his new surgical techniques, adding a surprising air of temporary legitimacy to Voronoff’s totally wacky claims. The surgeon professed that successful transplantation led to an increase in sex drive (that perennial male aging problem that has been exploited by quacks for centuries), as well as increased energy, better eyesight, and longer life.
Meanwhile, the Roaring Twenties were afoot and the global mood among the wealthy was one of unrestrained optimism and a gleeful willingness to experiment with new ideas. It was exactly the right time and place for monkey gland surgery to find a cultural foothold. Or rather, if there was ever the right time and place for monkey testicle transplantation, it was the 1920s. Monkey gland transplants became all the rage among the well-to-do and Voronoff became a fabulously wealthy celebrity surgeon, occupying the entire first floor of an expensive Paris hotel, attended to by a legion of valets and secretaries.
One surgeon noted that “fashionable dinner parties and cracker barrel confabs, as well as sedate gatherings of the medical elite, were alive with the whisper—‘monkey glands.’ ” Voronoff performed his $5,000 surgery on somewhere between five hundred and one thousand men over the next decade, most commonly at a special clinic he’d established in Algiers. (The monkey testicles, by the way, were harvested from the animals kept at Voronoff’s special “monkey farm” on the Italian Rivera.) Several notable people undertook the surgery, including Harold Fowler McCormick, chairman of the International Harvester Company, who hoped the procedure would help him keep up with his new, much younger wife, the Polish opera singer Ganna Walska. Another famous surgical participant was Frank Klaus, a middleweight boxing champion who was fighting a losing battle against the onset of middle age.
Voronoff exalting a chimpanzee.
Despite its popularity, as the 1920s rolled onward it became increasingly obvious that monkey gland surgery as male “enhancement” was a total bust. Voronoff drifted off into wealthy obscurity and when he died in 1951, few newspapers carried his obituary.
We suffer terribly from short-term memory, however, and it was only a scant few years after the downfall of the monkey gland that a new quack was advertising the rejuvenating abilities of the testicle from another creature entirely: the goat.
And now we return to John Romulus Brinkley. Instead of enrolling in a medical school sanctioned by the American Medical Association, Brinkley had opted for a cheaper, quackier route—the Eclectic Medical University in Kansas City. Brinkley was looking for fame and money, and the answer arrived with a resounding bleat.
Randy goat nuts, when transplanted into men’s scrotums, would surely restore male virility and youthfulness. They didn’t, of course—the transplanted tissue was rejected by the body, but the results of the placebo effect were once again surprisingly potent. As for the patients who were permanently injured by a surgeon who didn’t actually hold a medical license? Well, that part of the story was conveniently swept under the rug.
Brinkley took his goat show on the road, touring nationally and internationally in the 1930s. His claims were called “rot” by a former president of the AMA. When asked in court how he knew his surgeries worked, Brinkley replied, “I can’t explain it…I don’t know.” (Never words you want to hear from someone you’re paying to slice into your scrotum.)
Despite his nonstop ambition (he came close to winning a bid for governor of Kansas, and opened up a wildly successful radio station on the Mexico border), Brinkley died bankrupt in 1942 after a flurry of lawsuits.
“Nurse, hand me the goat testicles.” Brinkley’s surgery in action.
Beaver Testicles and Ambergris
Few items were more coveted for medieval medical dispensaries than beaver testicles and ambergris. Both male and female beavers excrete a yellow fluid called “castoreum” from their castor sacs, a type of scent gland. For the beavers, castoreum is useful for marking their territory. For humans, well, we’ve been convinced that castoreum is useful for pretty much every medical condition at some point in history. We were also convinced castoreum was found inside the beaver’s testicles. (Hot tip: It’s not.)
We were so into beaver-testicle harvesting that a popular medieval legend was that beavers, weary from being hunted, would just chew off their testicles at the sight of humans and throw the newly freed body parts directly at their oppressors. While the folktale does give beavers an enviable degree of badassery, it’s also totally bogus.
Ambergris, an excreted substance from the intestines of the sperm whale, has, like castoreum, been exploited by both perfume makers and physicians. The rare substance, roughly akin in value per weight to gold, was thought to be an effective medieval panacea, curing headaches, colds, heart disease, and epilepsy, for starters. You could even carry a ball of ambergris as a plague preventer (if you could afford to buy one).
A beaver getting ready to throw his nuts at you.
Monkey Glands
The monkey gland surgeries also made a deep cultural imprint in the 1920s, leading to a satirical novel (Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog), a famous cocktail, and a Marx Brothers song in the film The Cocoanuts:
Let me take you by the hand Over to the jungle band If you’re too old for dancing Get yourself a monkey gland.
The Monkey Gland Cocktail Recipe
Created by famous mixologist Harry MacElhone, a standard Monkey Gland contains the following:
1½ ounces gin • 1¼ ounces orange juice • 1 teaspoon grenadine • 1 teaspoon absinthe
Shake, strain, and serve.
The Relative Civility of the Modern Era
As Western medicine developed in the early modern era, we came to rely less and less on slaughtering animals for elaborate cures, instead contenting ourselves with simply locking animals in cages and using them for medical experimentation. It was much more “civilized” that way.
But we haven’t completely cut out animals from our drugs. Indeed, the dedicated vegan frequently finds himself in a quandary. Lest we feel too superior to our ancestors, here are some twenty-first-century cures rendered medieval style:
Diabetes Extract the pancreatic secretions of a hog, freshly killed, and inject into a vein in your arm. (insulin)
Dry eyes Extract the oil from the skin glands of a sheep and apply to eyes. (lanolin)
General illness Powder a variety of medical ingredients. Boil the bones, ligaments, and tendons of a cow or pig, and create a capsule from resulting mixture. Fill the capsule with medical ingredients, encourage patient to swallow. (gelatin)
Post-menopausal hot flashes Drink the urine of an impregnated mare. (Premarin)
Prevent blood clotting Extract mucus from the intestinal membranes of slaughtered pigs or from the lungs of slaughtered cows. Inject. (heparin)
So, really, we aren’t all that different from our ancestors, and some of our modern-day cures derived from animals may well find themselves a target for quackery books in the future. Our medieval forebearers were on to something with the spiderwebs and the snail slime. But binding ox brains to the heads of the mentally ill? Not so much. In the future we may feel the same about impregnating mares to harvest their urine.
22
Sex
Of Grecian Orgies, Pelvic Massage Prescriptions, Rectal Dilators, the Orgone Box, and Spanking Your Way to Fertility
Remember the song “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye? Well, Mr. Gaye was articulating in his oh-so-irresistible fashion an ancient sentiment that sex could be therapeutic. Not just procreating or expressing love or passing the time on a boring Sunday afternoon, but bona fide healing of the body. Although it took musical genius to spread this groovy message to the masses, the idea actually goes back several millennia.
For everything from hyst
eria to hemorrhoids, sexual activity has been prescribed for thousands of years as a cure. In roughly equal doses, however, abstinence has also been prescribed as a cure … often for the same diseases. We’ve rarely known what we were talking about. It’s always been difficult for us to extract our politics and biases from our sexual diagnoses. But we’re getting better. Slowly.
The zenith of medical intrusion into the bedroom was in the nineteenth century, when the Victorians, in a mind-boggling display of psychological hypocrisy, simultaneously encouraged female masturbation (via physicians) while condemning male masturbation. Our always complex medical relationship to our most intimate act, however, stretches even further back to the mountain slopes of ancient Greece.
An Orgy with The 300
Melampus was a rock star healer who shows up from time to time in ancient Greek mythology. One day, Melampus was called in by the ruler of Argos. The city was in the midst of a little problem: All of its virgins, after refusing to honor the phallus in a religious ritual, had gone mad and fled to the mountains. Melampus said, “No worries,” and then tracked down the roving packs of virgins on the slopes, subduing the lot with hellebore and encouraging them to have sex with the strong young men of Greece. (Remember the bro-fest of a movie that was The 300? Yeah, Melampus was basically saying you’ll feel a lot better if you have sex with guys who look like that.)
According to the story, Melampus’s sage advice was heeded and actually worked. The women found their madness dissipated after getting it on with some hunky Greek warriors. They returned from the mountains and resumed their daily lives in Argos.
So what does this story really tell us? It’s one of the first recorded instances of Western civilization encountering that age-old (male-created) issue of “female hysteria.” Melampus’s healing of the virgins was really an origin story for female madness stemming from a lack of sex. It was no accident, by the way, that Melampus went on to introduce the worship of Dionysus, god of fertility, to the rest of Greece. Feeling anxious, nervous, depressed, or in any way unfulfilled? Stop by a drunken orgy on Saturday night and you’ll feel a lot better.