The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [44]
Enthusiastically, de Kruif shared with his readers his quest for rejuvenation and the history of the science that had made rejuvenation possible. He narrated the tale of Arnold Adolf Berthold, professor of physiology at the University of Gottingen, who in 1849 removed the testicles from four roosters and watched two of them become “fat pacifists” while two others, in whom he had grafted new testicles, looked and acted like roosters once again. “They crowed. They battled. They chased hens enthusiastically. Their bright red combs and wattles kept growing.” He soberly recounted the cautionary tale of Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard, the founder of the science of endocrinology, who at seventy-two made himself an object of public ridicule by injecting himself with a solution made from the testicles of dogs and guinea pigs and announcing that this “testicle soup” had restored his youthful sexual vigor, mental acuity, and intestinal functioning. The sensation created by Brown-Sequard’s discovery quickly degenerated into ridicule as the elderly Frenchman’s “rejuvenation” failed within a month.
However, other scientists investigating the structure and function of the “ductless glands” of the endocrine system established scientifically a fact that farmers had known for centuries: the sex of an animal was entirely dependent on the presence and proper functioning of its gonads—testicles in the male and ovaries in the female—and its overall strength and vigor seemed mysteriously bound up with the health of those organs. Moreover, animals could be “masculinized” or “feminized” by gonadal manipulation. No matter their sex at birth, animals surgically deprived of their gonads and later implanted with either testicles or ovaries exhibited the behaviors characteristic of animals born with those organs.
The Viennese endocrinologist Eugen Steinach had shown that young rats and guinea pigs castrated at around four weeks old remained sexually immature, but that as soon as a replacement set of gonads was implanted in their abdomens, “symptoms of underdevel-opment or even retrogression passed away both in the male and in the female, even if they had been absent for some time.” Steinach also found that the sex expressed by the surgically altered animals was entirely dependent on the type of gonad he implanted in their abdomens: “the female implanted with the male gland will always be a male with all of his characteristics; and the male implanted with a female generative gland will develop into a full-fledged female. By implanting a male and a female generative gland simultaneously … Steinach produced hybrids (hermaphrodites).”
Steinach’s research had been followed closely by Magnus Hirschfeld and his colleagues at the Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin, as mentioned in the previous chapter. But it was Steinach’s American disciple Harry Benjamin who was to build a clinical practice based on the professor’s theories and to serve as the most fervent advocate of hormonal treatment for aging men and, later, transsexuals in the United States. By the time the future Christine Jorgensen read Paul de Kruif’s popular account of the power of hormones on gender and sexual behavior in 1948, Benjamin had been working to promote Steinach’s research in America for nearly twenty years. Steinach and, to a lesser extent, Magnus Hirschfeld were Benjamin’s mentors, and through him a European-style sexology was imported to America.
Born in Berlin in 1885, Harry Benjamin left Germany in 1913, the year after receiving his medical degree, to carry out research on tuberculosis in the United States. His return to Germany was prevented