The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [45]
Benjamin was released on the condition that he stay in the United States, and he began a medical practice in New York. “He started a small practice when he came to New York, living in the same room where he saw patients,” says Wheeler, who recalls Benjamin saying that “he paid six dollars a week for the room.” After the war, beginning in 1921, he returned to Germany each year to pursue his research interests and to renew his contacts with old friends and colleagues, including Magnus Hirschfeld (whom he had met in 1907). Because his major interest at the time was geriatrics, Benjamin was eager to meet Steinach, and the two men were introduced in 1921 in Vienna. “I was greatly impressed with his sex changes operations in rats and guinea pigs by means of castration and transplantation of endocrine glands,” Benjamin said in an interview a few years before his death in 1986. “From then on, I visited him as his disciple almost regularly every summer well into the thirties. Thus, I became, as it were, a transatlantic commuter, who tried to mediate between America and Europe.”
Benjamin was quick to acknowledge his indebtedness to both Hirschfeld and Steinach in later years. “Every year during the 1920s, I went to Berlin and spent many hours at Hirschfeld’s lectures at his institute, and more than once did I take part in the guided tours through the institute and its unique museums,” he said in an address given at the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, in November 1969. But significant as Hirschfeld and his institute were for Benjamin’s development as a humanitarian and sexologist, it was Steinach who claimed his allegiance as mentor. “Benjamin felt that Steinach was a genius,” says Christine Wheeler, and the two men carried on a forty-four-year correspondence, which is archived at the New York Academy of Medicine. Steinach could be difficult to deal with—Wheeler calls him “irascible”—but Benjamin remained loyal to his mentor. Harry Benjamin “was a humanitarian, fiercely loyal, very elegant, very old world,” says Christine Wheeler. “They used to call it breeding. So he protected Steinach.”
Benjamin soon became the leading proponent of the “Steinach operation” in America. Steinach’s researches with animals had convinced him that vasoligation, or the severing of the vas deferens (spermatic duct) in men—an operation that is today called vasectomy—resulted in an almost miraculous “rejuvenation” of aging mammals. Steinach’s senile animal subjects grew glossy new coats of hair, gained weight and muscle, and regained the strength and endurance characteristic of much younger animals. Encouraged by these findings, other physicians began to perform vasoligation in humans, and the surgery was soon being touted as a treatment not only for the lassitude of old age, but also for age-related diseases such as cancer and atherosclerosis. It appeared that the gonads were the seat not only of sexual identity and virility, but also of overall health and vigor. “They were trying to find sex hormones,” says Christine Wheeler, “but they were also looking for the fountain of youth.”
Many men of the era, celebrated and unknown, underwent the Steinach operation, hoping to stave off the physical and psychological effects of old age. Indeed, when Harry Benjamin met Sigmund Freud (through a referral from Steinach), Freud admitted that he, too, had undergone the Steinach operation, and