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 he felt his own “manhood” begin to slip away in his fifties. Not only were his sexual powers beginning to wane, but he felt his overall strength and enthusiasm for life and work—his vitality— begin to diminish. He looked to science for an explanation, and discovered the work of the “hormone hunters,” as he termed the early endocrinologists whose experiments with animals and human beings had pointed to a link between virility and vitality.
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 by the outbreak of World War I, and for a time he was interned as an enemy alien. “He came to America quite by happenstance, when a German doctor brought him to America to do TB research because he spoke a little English,” Benjamin’s friend and colleague Christine Wheeler told me in a 2002 interview. “He was on his way back to Germany when a British vessel seized the freighter and diverted it to London. He had very little money left, and he was essentially a POW because the war had broken out. But he was able to buy a one-way ticket back to the United States, and he hocked his watch to get back to New York because he had friends there.”
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 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
