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By Root 1927 0

medical student, physically underdeveloped when he was first examined by physicians at Albany Medical College in 1937. “His hips were wide like a woman’s; he had protruding breasts like a girl’s; he had almost no Adam’s apple; and his voice was high-pitched like a woman’s. He had only a hint of hair under his arms and none on his chest or belly, and pitifully to kid himself that he was a man, he shaved about once in ten weeks,” de Kruif writes. “There were large circles under his eyes, and his private parts were somewhat smaller in size than those of a four-year old boy. His penis, which the doctors measured, was one inch long and less than half an inch in diameter.” The young man had also suffered throughout his life from severe migraines and the kinds of hot flashes that trouble menopausal women. As a result of these difficulties, he was socially withdrawn and often depressed. Curiously, he was engaged to be married—though he admitted to his doctors that he was unable to maintain an erection and had very limited sexual feelings. In medical terms, the young man was suffering from “hypogonadism,” or testosterone deficiency.

James B. Hamilton, an anatomy professor at the college, was able to persuade the pharmaceutical company Ciba to send him “for purely scientific purposes—a supply of testosterone that was still worth more than its weight in gold,” writes de Kruif. “For the first time into any American man, as far as published records go, anatomist Hamilton and the doctors sent shots of testosterone into the flabby muscles of this twenty-seven-year-old boy’s arm and into those of his buttocks three times a week.” The results impressed the scientists. Previously, the young man had “experienced only the feeblest and most fleeting sexual sensations,” but within sixty hours of the first injection, he began to have erections. After a mere six days of injections, his erections “became more frequent and stronger; the size of his penis at rest became greater; and before the month of testosterone injections was completed, this man, impotent for life, was able to carry on sexual intercourse.”

But the effects of the hormone did not end there. The doctors witnessed what appeared to be a complete physical and psychological transformation. “The boy’s thyroid gland began to grow; his larynx became congested, and the doctors thought they could detect a lower pitch to his voice. The hot flashes that had bothered him for years disappeared completely. During that month he had only one attack of the migraine headache that had tortured him so long and so often. A curious new sap of self-confidence flowed through him, and energy, and he looked people in the face and was happy. Hair began to grow on his upper lip and his chest; and when he looked toward tomorrow, he no longer despaired.”

Concerned that these effects might be caused by autosuggestion, the doctors replaced the testosterone in the syringe with inert oil, without telling their patient. “In five days he had four hot flashes and then an attack of migraine. The erections of his penis, signals of his new miraculous manhood, began to weaken…. With his new manhood ebbing, at the same time away went his new pride and confidence, and now he was tired all the time again, after doing nothing.” When the doctors resumed the shots of testosterone (again, without informing the patient) “within a few days there was a startling upsurge in his total vitality and his march toward belated manhood.”

The case of this young man—the first American to be treated with the newly synthesized hormone testosterone—proved what experiments with castrated rats, guinea pigs, and other animals had suggested decades earlier. Manhood was hormonal. Young men who had never been men could be virilized, and old men whose manhood was waning could be “rejuvenated” or restored to their previous virility, through injections of the male hormone. Paul de Kruif, the science writer whose book introduced this novel concept to George Jorgensen and thousands of other Americans, had begun to look into the testosterone cure as