Rejuvenation hope proved to be sterile

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first experiments to test whether sterilisation could give older people a new lease of life

AT THE age of 69, WB Yeats, who was going through a period of ill health, despondency and creative barrenness, had an operation which was essentially a vasectomy but which promised physical and mental rejuvenation.

It seemed to work as far as he was concerned, because he wrote a few years later that the operation revived his creative power and also his sexual desire. He certainly produced a crop of late poems that rank with his best work.

For women, X-ray irradiation of the ovaries was held to be the equivalent of the male operation. The American novelist, Gertrude Atherton, had that treatment at 66 and wrote the novel, Black Oxen, based on her experience; it became the greatest success of her career. She, too, believed the treatment worked for her and often spoke about her “rejuvenation”.

But the experience of the 67-year-old Sigmund Freud, who had the same operation as Yeats, was quite different. He had had several operations for oral cancer and hoped the vasectomy would delay the disease’s return, but he later asserted that it did not do him any good.

Many less well-known men underwent the same procedure in the 1920s and 1930s in the hope that it would rejuvenate them physically and mentally. The idea that vasectomy could have this effect came from the eminent Viennese physiologist Eugen Steinach, whose name became used as a verb in the 1920s; people did not simply have the Steinach operation but were “Steinached”.

The main reason for the vogue for rejuvenation was the emergence of the new, dramatic science of internal secretions. The ductless glands emerged from obscurity in the late 19th century and it soon came to be believed that their mysterious secretions were all powerful. Endocrinology was a developing but still little understood aspect of medical science and the sex glands were at the heart of the scientific and cultural concerns about endocrinology.

Steinach’s name became quickly forgotten after his death in 1944. Professional endocrinologists and gerontologists with an interest in history felt uneasy talking about the subject of rejuvenation and, as a result, Steinach has tended to be airbrushed from the history of endocrinology.

This is a pity because he was a thoroughly professional, innovative and pioneering researcher. He was fundamentally concerned with the biological processes of sexual development and his main interest was not in discovering new, magical treatments. Whenever he advanced such claims, they were always rooted in his larger research programme, which was based on many pioneering animal experiments.

Some of these experiments began 100 years ago this year. Steinach castrated rats and guinea pigs and by re-implanting testicular or ovarian tissue in the castrated animals, he showed that male or female development in them was not programmed ab ovo(from the egg), as some leading scientists were arguing at the time. Ovaries grafted in male rats castrated in infancy caused their male sexual characters to be severely stunted but their breasts and nipples underwent remarkable growth. This showed that their sex characters were generated and maintained by the internal secretions of the sex glands and were constantly modifiable to some degree.

Steinach’s interest in sexual development focused not only on the origin and maintenance of the sexual characters but also on their degeneration due to ageing. His research in this area started from the proposition that the somatic sexual characters were present at all ages but developed fully only after puberty under the influence of the sex glands.

In rats castrated before puberty, the seminal vesicles remained undeveloped in adulthood. In intact animals also, he noted that the somatic sexual characters regressed to a near infantile condition in old age. From this he reasoned that the elderly, like pre-puberty castrates, lacked adequately functioning sex glands.

This was the crucial analogy that led to rejuvenation. He had previously shown that in castrates, normal sexual development could be induced by sex-gland transplantation. Could the sex glands of the aged be rejuvenated? In 1912, he reported that vasectomies he had carried out in elderly rats caused the germinal cells of the testes to be destroyed and the proliferation of hormone-producing interstitial cells. Within a few weeks, the previously lethargic, underweight and almost lifeless rats became active, gained weight and regained sexual interest.

A major paper he published in 1920 on rejuvenation caused a sensation because it included case histories of three humans subjected to the operation. Their vasectomies had been carried out, at Steinach’s suggestion, by his associate, a urologist, and were done during a concurrent operation and unknown to the men. Steinach reported that they had responded as markedly to the procedure as had the rats.

Soon there were reports of successful rejuvenation by the Steinach operation from all over the world. A vogue developed for the procedure during the 1920s and 1930s and the popular press turned Steinach and his followers into magicians. Steinach himself was furious with press misrepresentations of his research, rightly fearing such ludicrous reports would damn him in the eyes of orthodox physicians and encourage them to dismiss his entire work.

It is true that his “operation” never received the right amount of publicity in the right medical circles. It is also the case that he himself moved off into other areas of his larger project in endocrinology, and that the field itself became a biochemical rather than a physiological discipline. As one medical historian has put it, the story of Steinach is a “grand, tragic story of triumphalist science colliding with harsh realities and ending in oblivion”.

But if the Steinach operation helped Yeats to write such stunning late poems as Under Ben Bulbenand The Municipal Gallery Revisited, there must have been something in it – at least for some people.

Information contained in this article is taken from Tales from the Vienna Labs by Chandak Sengoopta MA, PhD, in The New York Academy of Medicine, No 2, Spring 2000