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By Root 1947 0

felt that “his general health and vitality had improved,” and that “the malignant growth of his jaw had been favorably influenced. ‘Don’t talk about it as long as I am alive,’ he said to me on parting. I told him I would not and I kept my promise,” Benjamin said in 1969. Freud’s unwillingness to publicize his surgery points to its somewhat unsavory reputation even in the days of his greatest success. Nonetheless, throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, Steinach’s disciples and colleagues performed the procedure on their aging male patients and gathered data that appeared to confirm its efficacy.

Harry Benjamin, whose New York medical practice focused mainly on geriatrics, was the most enthusiastic proponent of the method in the United States. He contributed the introduction and a number of case studies to Paul Kammerer’s 1923 study, Rejuvenation and the Prolongation of Human Efficiency, and arranged for a showing of the “Steinach Film,” a silent documentary on Steinach’s hormonal research, at the New York Academy of Medicine in 1923. “Broadly speaking, the Steinach Operation strengthens the endocrine system,” Benjamin writes in the introduction to Kammerer’s book. “On account of the inter-relationship of the different glands with an internal secretion and the influence these glands have over the nervous system, the strengthening of the glandular system will result in a re-energizing of the physical and mental capacities. Naturally such a strengthening should be resorted to if a glandular weakness or inferiority exists.”

Benjamin’s interest in the rejuvenation of aging patients was closely connected to interest in sexology, as both disciplines were at that time based in endocrinology. Soon after he started his gerontology practice, Benjamin began meeting with “a handful of physicians in New York, all of whom were deeply interested in aging,” says Benjamin’s colleague, Christine Wheeler. “They called themselves the Wednesday Night Group,” and they discussed what was going on in the world of sexology. They called this interest “sex physiology.” This study group, which began meeting in 1916, “explored the possible function and meaning of the ductless [glands], or endocrine glands, a full ten years before the Journal of the American Medical Association published its first article on the use of thyroid hormone,” Benjamin’s colleague Charles Ihlenfeld pointed out at a symposium on gender identity in 1975. A decade later, Benjamin, who worked as a consulting endocrinologist at the City College of New York in the thirties, “helped arrange financial support for Funk and Harrow who succeeded in the first isolation from human urine of a biologically active androgen,” Ihlenfeld said.

According to Benjamin’s protegee, Leah Cahan Schaefer, “Harry believed that the urine of young men might contain testosterone and he persuaded a professor friend at City College to collect the urine of his students. Subsequently, Casimir Funk developed the first sex hormones from the urine of young men. With the androsterone that Funk collected and produced, Harry Benjamin, once again at the forefront of scientific investigation, gave himself the first hormone injection. Funk almost fainted, but the only reaction on Harry was a terribly sore and bruised area where the injection had been made, due to the impurity of the new substance.”

Like his mentors Hirschfeld and Steinach, Benjamin believed “that you couldn’t separate the body from the mind,” says Christine Wheeler. “He believed in the effects of hormones on behavior and motivation.”

The effects of hormones were also very much on the mind of another New Yorker at that time. In 1948—the year that Harry Benjamin met his first transsexual patient—George Jorgensen, Jr., enrolled at the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistants School, in New York City. Frustrated by his inability to understand the French and German medical treatises on “hermaphrodism” and “pseudo-hermaphrodism” he found in the library at the New York Academy of Medicine, Jorgensen stubbornly sought another route to self-understanding.