> Steinach described how his patients “changed from feeble, parched, dribbling drones, to men of vigorous bloom who threw away their glasses, shaved twice a day, dragged loads up to 220 pounds, and even indulged in such youthful follies as buying land in Florida.”
No, the popular real estate scam of the 1920s was selling "oceanfront" property in florida that was really just swampland.
The origin story for Florida Man is that Florida's sunshine laws make police records public by default, so on a slow news day the local paper just trawls whatever wacky arrest records are open to the public and publishes that shit. Dumb crazy people are everywhere in the USA (and anywhere else) -- although more Florida stories involve alligators than average.
> Unsurprisingly, in light of his questionable medical training (75 percent completion at a less-than-reputable medical school), frequency of operating while intoxicated and less-than-sterile operating environments, some patients suffered from infection, and an undetermined number died. Brinkley would be sued more than a dozen times for wrongful death between 1930 and 1941.
Let's be fair: see how well you do implanting goat testicles in people when you're drunk and don't know what you're doing anyway.
Modern medical ethics obviously forbids anyone from being intoxicated or working in a less than spotless surgical environment. The price of caprine xenotransplantation has gone up 4000% even after accounting for inflation though.
The Dollop also covered him in episode 62! In addition to his freaky surgical quackery he was a pioneer in border blaster radio stations (operating in Mexico at higher power than the US's FCC would allow). He even got a law named after him to ban the practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinkley_Act
If you visit some of the 'street food' markets in the urban cores of Rawalpindi or Lahore you can find food cart vendors with fried sheep and goat testicles for sale. It's fairly common.
This reminds me of the joke with the tourist in spain, who orders "cohones del toro", the testicles of combat-bulls and likes them so much, it becomes his daily food.
One day he gets a much smaller portion. He calls the waiter to complain, pointing first at the arena, then at the plate :"What is this?"
The waiter: "Today the bull won."
I've had them. We were butchering a lamb, and my sister-in-law noticed that he had a nice pair (I'm being serious, they were very large), so she looked up a recipe. They're incredibly delicious, especially when cooked in cream. It may have been psychological, but we all felt like thumping our chests after eating them.
Would recommend trying them if you get the chance. Worth it.
Sheep testicles are actually more common. Bull testicles are a bit more rare, and generally come from old bulls. Lamb testes are pretty big, and absolutely delicious.
"the sooner the general public and especially septuagenarian readers of the latest sensation understand that for the physically used up and worn out there is no secret of rejuvenation, no elixir of youth, the better."
People were trying all kinds of things at this time to increase their labido. One such procedure was the implantation of goat testicles into the scrotum. A practice made popular by the fascinating and wrenched John Brinkley.
It's funny how at the time pop science said "eunuchs seem sickly and age more quickly" and today's pop science says "eunuchs live an unusually long time."
We still attach a lot of importance to the manipulation of sex hormones. We just do it in a better way now.
And in truth, being able to go through something like a "second puberty" could be good. We might today not like the exaggeration of sexual characteristics -- if anything we prefer childlike androgyny -- but some of the other things that happen during puberty -- brain development, increases to bone density -- could be useful.
He believed in his procedure so strongly that he “thrice reactivated himself.” It isn’t clear what he meant by “thrice,” because once the duct is tied off, it’s tied off.
There's a hilarious scene in Ned Beauman's "The Teleportation Accident" which revolves around Serge Voronoff’s monkey gland-grafting procedure. It's a wonderfully strange novel, set in the 1930's and richly marbled with the era's frenetic sexual, artistic, and scientific experimentation.
> Eventually more than a thousand men underwent the monkey gland treatment at the hands of doctors around the world, with the requisite material often being supplied by a monkey farm Voronoff set up on the Italian Riviera.
