Over the last few weeks, this column has followed the life of John R. Brinkley, a man born in western North Carolina but who made millions as a doctor in first Kansas, then Texas before he fell over accusations that he was a quack. He advocated the practice of surgically inserting goat testicles inside an aging man to make him young again. That’s why I love history, you can’t make this stuff up.
Granted, our understanding of the human body is today a lot better than it was a century ago, but still some things never change. It seems that man (and I mean mostly men here) has sought ways to hold off the aging process ever since he has been around. One of the oldest medical documents ever discovered can be translated as “Incantation for Transforming an Old Man into a Youth of Twenty,” dating back to ancient Egypt. The Greeks tried it too, believing a herb called satyrion could solve the problem. It was so popular that it became extinct when no one thought to save some to grow more.
This one might be the craziest. At the end of the first millennium in Britain, men gobbled up a substance they called “love bread.” What made it different from regular bread was the fact that it was harvested after maidens ran naked through the wheat fields. Once again, mankind, and for a second time I mean mostly men, will do anything to stay at their sexual peak.
As soon as someone says ‘this works’ a fad is born and the rush begins. Ginger, cloves, event fat from the hump of a camel were believed to be a magic substance that could roll back the years. It all goes to prove one thing. Losing our potency is such a terrible prospect that we will endorse anything that might stop nature from taking its toll.
Probably no one, other than maybe Dr. Brinkley, has ever gone bankrupt milking the public of their money over the forlorn hope that something out there, some undiscovered trick will return us to our glory days and make us the virile humans we were back when we may not have been wise enough to know what we had. Face it, on that count we are as gullible as ever.
During Brinkley’s era, scientists experimented with the glands of apes and even other humans in the hope of reversing the aging process. Tests were widely conducted in prisons since the incarcerated had few rights in those days. Those executed by the state became spare parts for insertion in others to explore fanciful theories. In the 1920s, technology was advancing so fast that anything was possible, which made Brinkley’s work with goats seem, if not likely, at least reasonable at the time.
And as the scientific process itself purports, experimentation is necessary to see what doesn’t work on the way to discovering what does. After all, somewhere along the way some poor soul had to try “massaging one’s genitals in ass’s milk” to see what would happen.
Photo: The mythical herb Satyrion that was harvested into extinction. For a fun read of the whole story, check out Pope Brock’s book, Charlatan, about Dr. Brinkley.
