Bonk (15 page)

A parallel absurdity took root around 1550. A medical expert of some repute made the claim that erection alone could not be considered sufficient proof of potency. Accused men would hereafter need to prove, in front of a panel of examiners, that they could mount their wife and ejaculate, as the medico put it, “into the appropriate orifice.” Here it was the wife’s genitalia that received the more rigorous scrutiny. “The woman is examined close up, to discover if she be more dilated than on the last inspection…(and if there be an emission, and where, and of what nature).”

Given that the wife stood to lose her case if her husband succeeded at his task, you had a situation that was equal parts rape and burlesque: “The husband complaining that his partner will not permit him to perform and does hinder intromission, his wife the while denying the charge and claiming that he would put his finger therein and dilate and open her by such means alone.”

The year 1677, blessedly, saw the end of the era. A public prosecutor decreed the practice obscene and deplorable, and trial by congress was condemned to, as they say, the appropriate orifice.

t
his morning finds Dr. Hsu’s patient subjected to a public inspection that, while not on the order of a French impotence trial, must be awkward to say the very least. The man reclines on a vinyl examining table, his arm behind his head. I am behind Dr. Hsu, trying to look as though I belong here. If not for the scatter of gray hairs, you would not guess the patient to be much over thirty. He looks at once bookish and athletic, the sort of man a mother will approve of. He is chatting with Dr. Hsu, who translates for me.

“He is feeling every morning tumescence. He hasn’t had sex yet, but…No pressure, no pain.” The patient is dressed in loose-fitting cotton shorts, which Dr. Hsu now instructs him to pull down. I pick up a journal on Dr. Hsu’s desk and pretend to read it. It is published by the Taiwanese Association of Andrology, whose logo, I note, is a diverting variant of the snakes-and-sword caduceus: a penis flanked by free-floating testicles.

The man pulls down his pants without a flicker of embarrassment. Maybe he thinks I’m a nurse. Maybe it’s different here in Taiwan. Maybe the population is more matter-of-fact about sex and nakedness than we are in the States. Taipei hotel rooms, I’ve noticed, have condoms the way American hotel rooms have shower caps and Bibles. Last night, channel surfing, I stumbled upon what appeared to be the local shopping channel. A man in a golf cap, looking bored, displayed a Nokia cell phone. Ordering information appeared on the screen. But rather than a narration about the excellent features of this telephone, the soundtrack was a song being sung by an agitated, single-minded woman: “I don’t know your name, but it doesn’t really matter. Let’s have good hot long fast
wild horny dirty sex
!”

I find myself wondering about this patient. He seems too young to have problems with aging erectile tissue. What if his problem is psychological? Would therapy have been a better bet? Who knows. Perhaps he did not care to confront his emotional gremlins. Perhaps he preferred to blame his veins.

The desire to blame impotence on physiology rather than psyche is understandable. But caution is advised. You can’t always trust science to get it right. Indeed, the first widespread surgical treatment of impotence was a farce of grand proportions.

The Testicle Pushers

If Two Are Good, Would Three Be Better?

w
hen you are eighty-two years old and you have sixty-four wives, you need all the help you can summon. For Kamil Pasha, a vizier (bigwig) in the Ottoman Empire, help took the form of testicle consommé. The broth, which the Pasha quaffed daily, was made by steeping the danglers of robust young hoof stock. The vizier’s enthusiasm for his vile bullion did not escape the notice of the harem obstetrician, Skevos Zervos. Zervos had been observing the Pasha’s staff of eunuchs and musing on the feminizing effects of destroying a man’s testicles. He began to hatch a theory of testes as the key to lifelong virility.

In between deliveries, Zervos began experimenting. He attempted to rejuvenate aging rabbits and dogs by grafting testicle tissue from younger specimens onto their own geriatric gonads. He went public with a paper in 1909, stirringly entitled “Curious Experiences with the Genital Organs of the Male.” The paper’s aim was to popularize the technique so that eventually it would be available to all men.

The Pasha was not amused. He accused Zervos of plotting to restore his eunuchs’ manhood. Fearing for his life, Zervos fled to Athens. There, in 1910, for the first and far from the last time, strips of ape testicle were implanted into a man. Zervos advertised the technique as a cure for both impotence and senility.

Word spread. By 1916, the nut graft had gone mainstream. In the first of two
JAMA
articles, G. Frank Lydston, a professor of genitourinary surgery at the Chicago College of Physicians and Surgeons, outlined the beneficial effects of tissue from a third testis—in this case, a human one—implanted in the scrotum beside the two that nature had bestowed.
*
Though an increase in “sexual power” and “vigorous and prolonged erections” were the most common type of claimed results, the secretions of the auxiliary gonad, in Lydston’s view, erased many of the afflictions of advancing age: high blood pressure, senility, arteriosclerosis. At one point he described curing a twenty-two-year-old youth of, among other afflictions, the “frequent writing of incoherent, rambling dissertations on architecture.” It seemed no ailment stood strong in the face of another man’s testis.

Lydston began by focusing on men whose own glands were obviously stunted or defective: the seventeen-year-old with no signs of virility and a testicle “about the size and shape of a small Lima bean,” for instance, or the twenty-one-year-old saddled with “unsatisfactory and unpleasurable coitus” and testicles “the size of a navy bean.” (Lydston had earlier compared a withered male gonad to a hazelnut, but wisely shifted to the bean family for his size comparisons—the word “nut” perhaps cutting a bit close to the Lydston bone.) As enthusiasm for the procedure built, Lydston began expanding his patient base, operating upon men with normal-sized testes as well. Early on, he had done the procedure on himself.

While Lydston had no trouble scaring up patients, finding donors was more problematic. Though a single testicle, like a lone kidney, is capable of taking on the duties of its absent teammate, rare is the man willing to part with a gonad for charity. Unable to secure the sex glands of virile young men, Lydston made do with the next best thing: the sex glands of
dead
virile young men. It appears he had a sympathetic friend at the city morgue, and that Chicago’s young male accident victims around that time may have paid an additional price for their heedlessness. Most of Lydston’s case studies described the unwitting donor as “dead of accident.” Two hapless teens—one in 1918, one in 1915—succumbed to “a crushing injury” of the head, leading one to wonder if G. Frank Lydston occasionally prowled the back alleys of South Side Chicago armed with something larger and heavier than a navy bean.

Lydston insisted that dead men’s testicle tissue would take, provided the operation was completed before the organ had begun to decompose; though as time wore on, he began to play looser with his rules. While the first donor testicle had been out of commission just six hours at the time of the operation, later organs sat on ice for thirty-six or even forty-eight hours.

This sort of delay wouldn’t pass muster with French gonad grafter Serge Voronoff. The Russian-born émigré insisted that the gland must be transferred within seconds, lest changes in the cells compromise its vitality. Voronoff dreamed of a day when special hospitals would be set up, in which “candidates for glandular grafting will remain, in readiness to receive the required organs from the fatally injured cases who will be rushed thither.”

The closest America came to such a facility was San Quentin State Prison’s death row. In a series of experiments—about which we’ll hear more shortly—San Quentin resident physician Leo L. Stanley plucked the gonads from some thirty freshly executed inmates and grafted them into thirty aged or “prematurely aged” inmates.

Meanwhile, Serge Voronoff, lacking contacts at prisons or morgues, was forced to come up with an alternate source of fresh testicle. Voronoff turned to apes and monkeys: chimpanzees, mostly, and the occasional baboon. The baboon, you may be interested to learn, carries a much bigger testicle than his TV-trainable cousin. So much so that Voronoff took to splitting the balls in two, parceling them out by halves to his patients.

The back half of Voronoff’s 1925 book
Rejuvenation by Grafting
is a catalogue of case studies: page after page of aging men, pillars of society, who paid the charismatic Frenchman a prodigious sum to have slices of chimp testicle surgically installed in their scrotum. Along with his other medical innovations, Voronoff appears to have pioneered the medical Before and After shots. The Befores are invariably seated, but many of the Afters are action shots—seventy-year-old men in spats and cravats, striding and leaping across the lawn, demonstrating their newfound vigor.

By the patients’ own testimonies, however, Voronoff’s operation was something of a bust. “The genital coldness has changed very little,” noted one. “I am somewhat more active; and the sexual function is very slightly stimulated. That is all,” groused another. And another: “I am increasingly wretched.”

Voronoff must have longed for the early, experimental days of his grafting career, when none of his patients complained or issued lukewarm reviews, because they were sheep. Beginning in 1913, he took the testicles out of more than one hundred young rams, sliced them, and grafted the strips into “miserable old beasts” who then became “young in their gait, bellicose and aggressive,…full of vitality and energy.” In the Voronoff tradition, selected animals were posed for portraits, standing on seamless paper and looking, to my eye anyway, no different Before and After. Charmingly, Voronoff named his research animals, but not the way most people name animals. He named them the way people name perfumes, or in this case, something closer to an ill-conceived line of cologne: Old Ram No. 12, Old Ram No. 14, etc.

San Quentin’s Leo Stanley had better luck than Lydston had with his human subjects. He published a paper in a 1922 issue of
Endocrinology
, summing up the effects of 1,000 testicular grafts. The donors were mixed: 20 executed San Quentin inmates and a party mix of common hoof stock, including goats, rams, boars, and deer.

The results were nothing short of astounding. Forty-nine of 58 asthmatics reported improvement, as did 3 of 4 diabetics, and 3 of 5 epileptics, 81 of 95 sufferers of “sex lassitude,” and 12 of 19 impotent men. (These last two stand out as especially impressive—or something—given that he was dealing with an all-male prison population.) Even more astonishing, 32 of 41 men said they could see better, and 54 of 66 acne victims—apparently taking a daily blemish tally—reported a decrease “in the number of pimples.” Dr. Stanley failed to mention something that David Hamilton, author of
The Monkey Gland Affair,
pointed out: that in exchange for participating in the study, the men were either paroled sooner or paid with cash. It’s probable that they felt some pressure to tell the doctor what he wanted to hear.

Serge Voronoff kept data on his patients, too, but it was a perplexing mixture of bluster and failure. “In 26 to 55 percent,” he wrote, “the physical and mental rehabilitation was accompanied by complete restoration of sexual activity.” Well, was it 26 percent, or was it 55 percent?

It didn’t matter. Testicle madness was in full bloom. Bars in the 1920s were serving a drink called the Monkey Gland, and shops in Paris sold ashtrays decorated with whimsical chimps with their hands on their genitals and the words “No, Voronoff, you won’t get me!” By 1924, some 750 medical professionals and not-so-professionals were plying the gonad trade. These included not just the misguided and the deluded, but the intentionally deceitful. Prominent among the latter was John R. Brinkley, a Kansas-based surgeon with a diploma-mill M.D. and his own radio station. “A man is as old as his glands,” went the Brinkley slogan, broadcast far and wide on KFKB. Every Sunday, a dozen or more somber men arrived at the Milford train station from points distant, to be processed for Brinkley’s miracle four-part operation to restore sexual vigor with goat glands.

At one point, Brinkley was taking delivery on forty Toggenburgs a week, housed in a corral behind the hospital. He encouraged his patients to personally select their donor, like diners at a Chinese seafood restaurant being ushered to the aquarium. At a hearing described in
The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley
, the enterprising quack was forced to admit that the operation was not only useless—the patient’s immune system would attack the gonadal interloper, breaking the animal tissue down and eventually absorbing it—but often dangerous. Infections were common and patients were sometimes rendered sterile. Not to mention the ill effects on the donors, who were “fed to the coyotes” after surrendering their billyhood.

These days, the only animal testicles being implanted into men are silicone prosthetics called Neuticles—intended for neutered pets. Silicone is FDA-approved for breast implants and a host of other human body-part plumpers, but no one has paid the millions of dollars it would take to get testicular implants (for cancer patients) approved by the FDA—mainly because there aren’t enough cases of testicular cancer to make it worthwhile. So men who have had a testicle surgically removed will sometimes order a Neuticle
*
and have a plastic surgeon install it. As long as the men don’t mention that the prosthetic is for them, not their pet, the manufacturer can’t get into trouble. These days Neuticles makes cosmetic gonads ranging from the Feline model to the Bull, accommodating, one hopes, most men’s needs.