In 1918, Leo L. Stanley, a doctor at San Quentin prison, attracted attention after he transplanted the testicles of an executed man into a senile 60-year-old inmate. He subsequently claimed to have successfully implanted both human and animal testicles in 643 inmates, most of whom were feeble or mentally disabled, all with outstanding results—at least in his view. He also experimented with injecting inmates with a serum made from animal testicles, which, he reported, cured everything from senility to acne. His successes, however, never materialized outside the prison’s walls.
One of the more publicity-minded surgeons who promised to restore youth by transplanting organs was Serge Voronoff, a Russian who lived in Paris. During a visit to the United States in 1920, he demonstrated his technique of grafting the testicles of young animals onto old ones. His reported success prompted a frenzy of attention and he received thousands of requests for lectures, demonstrations, and interviews. Later that year, he transplanted monkey testicles into men who had lost their sexual drive, and by 1922 claimed to have performed five hundred operations on men.
Many doctors scoffed at his boasts of restoring sexual vigor, eliminating senility and hair loss, and prolonging life. In October 1922, the French Academy of Medicine refused to allow Voronoff to deliver a paper on his gland grafts. But the public was enthralled and showed up in force the following day when he spoke at another venue about his work. There was a “near riot” the Chicago Daily Tribune recounted. “Hundreds of persons, almost half of whom were young girls and women, almost fought to enter the experimental laboratory of the College of France where the Russian savant had waiting some rejuvenated men, some rejuvenated rams, moving pictures, and a mass of fascinating detail. One woman became so thrilled with Dr. Voronoff’s description of ‘virile impulses’ that she jumped up and shouted, ‘When are you going to do something like that for us women?’ ‘You ladies will never need anything like that. It is only old men who need it,’ Dr. Voronoff said smilingly.”
As evidence, he presented one 74-year-old patient, who said the operation restored his health and hair, filled out his wrinkles, and reversed early signs of senility. The French press threw its support behind Voronoff and chastised “official scientists who [are] always retrograde owing to their dead weight of age and honors.” Popular sentiment may have accounted for the academy’s decision to permit one of Voronoff’s pupils, a Paris physician named Francis Heckel, to deliver a paper in January 1923 about the twenty-seven operations he had performed grafting monkey testicles onto human beings. “Dr. Heckel said that a majority of those applying for grafting—there were many hundreds daily—were men of fifty or sixty years who gave as a reason that they wished to complete some life work they had undertaken or see some particular enterprise through, which had not yet been crowned with success,” the New York Times reported. Later that year, the French Academy finally permitted Voronoff to perform two operations grafting chimpanzee glands onto human testicles. “Dr. Voronoff’s triumph was complete last night when two of the best known surgeons in Paris defended the scientific worth of the gland operations,” the Chicago Daily Tribune announced.
The accolades turned business-minded followers to Africa as investors excitedly talked about cornering the market on chimpanzees. In 1925, Voronoff commenced raising chimpanzees on a farm in the Congo to provide testes for his famed procedures.
The doctor’s scientific acclaim was short-lived. Voronoff’s accounts of the number of operations he performed kept changing, as did the duration of their success. Effects could dissipate in four to six months, he admitted. By 1926, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association declared Voronoff’s transplants to be useless and possibly harmful. His tales of miraculous rejuvenations continued to fascinate the public, though, influencing the popular imagination far beyond the actual number of surgeries or successes. Voronoff kept at it, telling an interviewer in 1939 that in the twenty years that followed his first animal-to-human transplant, he had performed two thousand gland grafts.
Commerce and science happily collaborated, as both respected scientists and basement dodgers promoted and sold rejuvenation therapies. Men were by far the most frequent patients and lab subjects. World War I’s heedless slaughter of young men generated fears about the descent of the white race. Building up the “male principle” or “seminal liquor” might offer a means of restoring the vitality of absent youth. Both racial and class worries continued to surround surgical and hormonal efforts to regain the look and vigor of youth. In his 1920 tract, Life, Voronoff, referring to his own gland transplants, asked: “Does any scientific discovery of the ages exceed this in its importance to the individual and the race?”
There are no convincing estimates of how many people signed up for some kind of rejuvenation treatment, serious or faked. Celebrated physicians with impressive credentials performed the procedures on Park Avenue clients, but there were many more urban and small-town quacks who opened storefront rejuvenation clinics that lured in bankers, merchants, laborers, and farmers worried about their looks, their energy, their sexual appetite, or their jobs. Some physicians offered to graft testes from goats and rams onto men; other charlatans simply filled vials with colored water and injected the substances into a patient’s arm or buttocks. If the snake-oil salesmen ran out of patients or, more likely, were run out of town, they simply set up shop elsewhere. Medical diploma mills and fraud made it easy for people to pass themselves off as qualified doctors. The procedures clearly did not work, but that did not dampen the public’s fascination with rejuvenation, which crossed both class and gender lines. As David and Sheila Rothman relate in their book The Pursuit of Perfection, “Doctors were facing unhappy patients, old men complaining of reduced sex drive, impaired mental performance, fatigue and malaise. Rather than just standing there, the doctors were doing something.”
Gertrude Atherton’s bestselling novel Black Oxen, published in 1923, captures the widespread fear of midlife’s physical waning and the promise of science to cure it. The book tells the story of the stunning and mysterious Countess Zattiany, whose sudden appearance in New York provokes whispers because of her uncanny resemblance to a fashionable society figure who sailed for Europe thirty years earlier. Zattiany, it turns out, is actually the 58-year-old Mary Ogden, restored to her youth and vigor through scientific rejuvenation treatments discovered in Vienna. The book’s title comes from the 1912 play The Countess Cathleen by William Butler Yeats: “The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.”
Atherton—an arresting beauty with a tumble of blond hair, a triangular nose, and a smooth neck that she liked to display with off-the-shoulder dresses—was obsessed with maintaining her looks. At 19, she stole a suitor whom her 37-year-old mother hoped to marry, George H. P. Atherton, a charming 24-year-old wastrel. Years later, she described the incident as “the old story of youth calling to youth against the declining charms of middle-age.” After eleven years of George’s failing businesses, frequent moves, and gambling losses, Gertrude was relieved when he traveled to Chile to seek a fortune in 1877. A few weeks later, he was dead after hemorrhaging from a kidney stone and returned home doubled over in a barrel of rum. Freed from the confines of a conventional marriage, Atherton became a journalist and an author. Of the sixty books she wrote, Black Oxen was her most famous. Her friend, the novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten, called it “a book for flappers to laugh at, for middle-aged women to weep over, and for really aged ladies to be thankful for.”
A year after its publication, Hollywood turned the book into a film, with Clara Bow as the sweet-faced young seductress and the stunning silent-film star Corinne Griffith as the middle-aged European countess. Atherton’s tale is fictional, but it was inspired by her own experience with youth-enhancing techniques developed by the most celebrated hormone researcher of the day, Eugen Steinach, at his exclusive spa. Like Brown-Séquard before him, Steinach believed that a dissipat
ion of sperm was responsible for the body’s overall decline as men aged. His solution was to perform a vasectomy. By sealing off the passageway through which sperm traveled from the testes, he believed he could build up the concentration of male hormone and “reactivate the entire endocrine system and organism.” Fertility was the trade-off for male potency. (Yeats subjected himself to a Steinach rejuvenation treatment in a British clinic in 1934.) To stimulate more hormone production in women, Steinach repeatedly exposed their ovaries to X-rays. On Central Park West, the procedures were offered by Harry Benjamin, a German endocrinologist who regularly traveled to Vienna to study with Steinach. Benjamin, who lived to 101, was ultimately best known for coining the word “transsexualism” to refer to patients who were convinced their bodies had betrayed their true nature. Introduced by the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to a young man who insisted he was a woman, Benjamin later performed the first sex-change operation in America. In the 1950s, he counseled the British writer Jan Morris about a sex-change operation, saying: “If we cannot alter the conviction to fit the body, should we not, in certain circumstances, alter the body to fit the conviction.” Although the context is different, that same advice applies to rejuvenation efforts undertaken by those in midlife. Altering the body to create an identity or fulfill a desire is commonplace today, but this notion took root in the twenties with rejuvenation treatments and plastic surgery.
Benjamin believed in the efficacy of Steinach’s practice of giving men vasectomies to concentrate their hormones and zapping women’s ovaries with X-rays to stimulate them. One patient said his eyesight improved, another claimed his bald head grew a thick thatch of hair. The same year Black Oxen appeared, Freud went under Steinach’s knife in the hope it would stave off his painful oral cancer and reinvigorate him.
Some of Steinach’s critics suggested the effects were all psychological, that he had simply freed his patients from society’s view that aging was inevitably linked with decline. But Benjamin remained enthusiastic. After examining a handful of Steinach’s patients, in 1921 Benjamin wrote up an assessment of the Viennese physician’s procedures for the Academy of Medicine that was reported in the New York Times: “Dr. Benjamin was of the opinion that the Steinach discovery was one of the most scientifically founded.” As soon as Atherton read it, she sought out the doctor. While the treatments, long discredited, make for cringe-worthy reading today, Atherton was a gloriously satisfied customer, claiming that the eight treatments over a period of three weeks gave her renewed energy as well as smoother skin. She became an ardent fan of Dr. Benjamin’s, and her book was read not only as a juicy romance in gilded New York but also as a promotional tract for the method.
“Poor Dr. Benjamin! I nearly ruined him,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Women besieged him, imploring him to give them the treatment free of charge or at a minimum price. It was the first time they had seen a ray of light in a future menaced with utter fatigue and the clutching of young hands at the jobs that were wearing them out.” Not that Atherton blamed them. “We live in an age of scientific marvels,” she declared, “and those who do not take advantage of them are fools and deserve the worst that malignant Nature can inflict upon them.” For decades afterward, Atherton continued to get letters from middle-aged housewives and working women desperate to be let in on this supposed cure.
A decade after Atherton published Black Oxen, C. P. Snow presented a much darker vision of rejuvenation in his anonymously published 1933 novel New Lives for Old. Here, two scientists discover how to synthesize a rejuvenating hormone called collophage. Initially hailed as a miracle drug, it ends up sowing bitter social tensions in Britain between those who can afford treatment and those who can’t, between older workers who refuse to retire and younger ones unable to get jobs, between mothers and daughters who vie for the same young men. The mania for collophage results in an underground market that causes malpractice and death. Finally, the poor riot and overthrow the government.
As negative views of midlife spread in the twenties, rejuvenation was frequently seen as a means of preserving the upper classes from the deleterious effects of aging. Steinach believed his treatments were a boon for the “intellectual class.” Benjamin shared his bias, reporting happily in 1925 that among his patients “the intelligent class predominates by far”—doctors, writers, businessmen, professors, and lawyers. They were also, not coincidentally, the ones who could afford such elective treatments.
The Promise of Hormones
The major glands in the body were identified in the early decades of the twentieth century, and by the 1930s, advances in organic chemistry enabled scientists to synthesize inexpensive versions of the sex hormones. Hormone therapy could claim impressive accomplishments, curing or treating debilitating diseases like cretinism and diabetes. To some practitioners, hormones held limitless potential to solve nearly every physiological, psychological, and behavioral malady—or, rather, what they considered to be maladies, including aging. Hormones secreted by the reproductive organs in men and women were thought to cause physical and mental decline, including hair loss, senility, decreasing libido, nervous exhaustion, and more. A hormonal imbalance was widely believed to cause homosexuality, and many psychologists blamed hormones for psychosis. Male endocrinologists and those in related fields defined what was “normal” and “deviant” in terms of glandular functions.
The most extravagant claims proved false, but in the coming decades hormone supplements would form the spine of a colossal antiaging industry built around middle-aged men and women.
Plastic Surgery
Rejuvenation aimed to restore the physical condition of youth, while the rudimentary field of plastic surgery attempted to simulate its appearance. If middle age was defined by the body, then perhaps modifying the body could keep middle age at bay.
Few people underwent plastic surgery in these early years, but its adoption by physicians illustrates important themes that relate to perceptions of midlife: a fundamental expansion of the medical profession’s very purpose, from preventing illness to promoting happiness, and the conviction that happiness can be attained through physical improvement.
Remolding a person’s features for aesthetic purposes, which began in the late nineteenth century, initially elicited mixed feelings that revealed underlying anxieties about class and race. Elites were already disturbed by how burgeoning consumerism permitted people to mask their social origins by buying the outward trappings of a higher caste. Surgeons who performed nose jobs were welcomed for facilitating personal transformation and contentment, yet they were also considered suspect for enabling people to “pass” as something other than what they were—a syphilitic with a disfigured nose as a healthy man, a black trying to pass as white, or a Jew pretending to be a Christian. Reviewing the history of plastic surgery in Making the Body Beautiful, the cultural critic Sander Gilman connects its growth to assumptions that race and physical appearance were outward signs of intelligence and worth, a Dorian Gray’s–eye view of the world. After Darwin, the nineteenth-century criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Alphonse Bertillon, and the psychologist Frances Galton (Darwin’s cousin and the founder of the new “science of eugenics”) created classification systems to identify immigrants, criminals, and the insane according to their facial features. Lombroso, who treated crime as a disease with a biological component, described murderers as having straight aquiline noses “like the beak of a bird of prey”; rapists were identifiable by their “bushy eyebrows”; and counterfeiters by their small eyes and large noses. Later Alexis Carrel, who gained fame with his immortal chicken heart, became a staunch eugenicist and admirer of Hitler. He wanted to extend life as a way of protecting the white race against its inferiors.
Industrial consumer society’s preoccupation with physical appearance did not necessarily lead to unsavory philosophies, but it was at odds with the values of character and self-discipline widely promoted for much of the nineteenth century. School lessons and Sunday sermons praised self
-sacrifice. Inner virtue was said to be valued above outer beauty (whether people acted on their principles is another question). In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1846 story “The Birth-Mark,” a scientist’s desire to rid his wife of a reddish birthmark on her cheek ends in her death. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Amy is chastised for being overly concerned with the shape of her nose; such vanity is seen as a moral defect.
Fabulously popular success manuals emphasized this familiar old-fashioned morality and tied it to flourishing in life. “Keep in mind the great truth that you are forming a character for eternity,” Harvey Newcomb wrote in How to Be a Lady: A Book for Girls (1850), which contained useful hints on the development of character. William Mathews, an English professor at the University of Chicago, reminded men to be true to thine own selves in his 1872 tract Getting on in the World; or, Hints on Success in Life. “Blow some kind of a trumpet, or at least a penny whistle to draw the world’s eye on you; but be sure that you are what you pretend to be, before you blow . . .” or “woe be unto you!” Orison Swett Marden, an unflagging motivational author, published Character: The Grandest Thing in the World in 1899. Wanting to improve one’s character was “the highest ideal,” he wrote, and ultimately the foundation for a happy and successful life. “True worth is in being, not seeming,” he reminds readers, “inner character eventually out-shines the most seductive outward physical beauty.”
As society reordered its priorities and values after the turn of the century, so did self-help manuals. By 1909, the very same Orison Swett Marden declared in a new book: “You cannot estimate the influence of your personal appearance upon your future. . . . It does not matter how much merit or ability an applicant for a position possesses, he cannot afford to be careless of his personal appearance.” By 1921, Marden had further fine-tuned his advice, telling women to use their beauty as a way of attracting and holding attention and friends. Hundreds of self-help books and articles offered similar advice, emphasizing that one’s appearance and a good first impression were stepping-stones to personal success.
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