This political cartoon of Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) shows him as a circus performer, reaching into the gut of an exotically dressed assistant while masses of people line up to watch the operation. Voronoff detested this sort of depiction, because he took his work extremely seriously. After all, he was considered a leader in organ transplant surgeries, and his operations aimed at procuring health and vitality for the aged (those who could afford his pricey operations, anyway). After all, that noble cause was the reason he was grafting the testicles of baboons and chimpanzees into men’s scrotums.
You did not misread. Russian-born but himself a transplant — to France — Voronoff studied medicine and surgery and was fascinated by the role of hormones on human gonads, and on the connections between sexual virility and youth. For instance, he followed up on the work of Charles-Édouard Brown-Sequard, who in 1889 injected himself with a concoction of blood, semen, and ‘juice extracted from the testicles’ of dogs and guinea-pigs. The mixture gave Sequard a sense of youth: the good doctor was able to run up stairs again at age 72 and he gained (or claimed to) new abilities to mentally focus. The same elixir didn’t work for Voronoff, so he looked elsewhere for such effects.
Voronoff honed his surgical skills on domesticated animals, and in 1920, he moved his operations onto humans, and the treatments swiftly became ultra- high in demand. The procedure involved Voronoff taking a testicle from a chimp, thinly slicing it into strips, and implanting some of the bits into the human patient’s scrotum — which he had incised to expose the testicles.
The idea was that the ape’s sex glands would infuse the human patient with youth, and Voronoff believed that his operation could cure senility, extend the human lifespan, and of course, increase sexual potency. Throughout the 1930s, hundreds of men flocked to go under Voronoff’s knife.
As time went on, however, scientists became suspicious and Voronoff’s patients’ success stories seemed fueled by good wishes rather than hard data. Voronoff was rich, but his reputation had suffered a mortal blow by the time he died in 1951.
Source(s): _Vice&, “The strange history of men going nuts for monkey testicle transplants,” Ivan Cenzi, Jan 11, 2021. @inews.co.uk, “The disturbing things early 20th century men did to try and reverse the ageing process,” Dr. Kate Lister, Sept 17, 2018 updated Oct 9, 2020. _Atlas Obscura&, “The true story of Dr. Voronoff’s plan to use monkey testicles to make us immortal,” Eric Grundhauser, Oct 13, 2015.
