Senescence, the Last Half of LifeHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Senescence, the Last Half of Life
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Geriatrics
Most important of all, and the chief source of human energy in man, are
the sex glands, which distribute energy to all the sixty trillion cells
of the body, making each carry out the function assigned it. Voronoff
made personal studies of eunuchs in the East and among the many traits
so often mentioned he finds them not only arrested along various lines
of bodily and psychic growth but short-lived and perhaps old before
they are forty. They are often selfish and crafty. Sex glands stimulate
not merely amorousness but all kinds of cerebral and muscular energy,
pouring into the blood a species of vital fluid, and give a sense of
vigor and well-being and plenitude of life, which later vanish when
their source begins to run dry in age. Can this wonderful source of
human energy be placed, in any sense, in man’s control? It has already
been proven that trituration of the sex glands does not produce its
entire product and particularly lacks the active element. Moreover, all
preparations of this liquid change very rapidly and may even become
toxic. This method has passed beyond the stage of ingestion in the
stomach or subcutaneous ingestions.
Voronoff undertook to graft young sex glands themselves into
bodies older than those from which they came and if they lived and
throve in the body of the host, the product they secreted would
be complete and also vital. He says of the testes: “To graft this
gland is to participate at first hand in the work of creation, to
imitate nature in the procedures which she has elaborated in order
to secure the harmonious functioning of our body”[190] (p. 65). He
published his first results in 1912. He then showed a lamb born
of an ewe whose ovaries he had removed, replacing them with the
ovaries of her younger sister. His most important paper was read in
October, 1919, on “Testicular Grafts.” He had been experimenting on
flocks of sheep and goats, grafting the whole gland in twenty-five,
large fragments in fifty-eight, and small ones in thirty-seven
individuals. Transplantation was effected subcutaneously sixty-five
times, in the scrotum itself thirty-two times, and twenty-three
times in the peritoneum. Anastomosis did not follow; nor was it
necessary. Testicular tissue, he thinks, has remarkable aptitude for
transplantation and a microscopist, M. Retterer, shows us with abundant
illustrations just what takes place. The nutrition of the small
fragments was more easily assured than that of the large fragments or
the whole. Sometimes where sex power is restored in old animals so
that they bear young, the parental instinct seems weakened, but the
rejuvenation effects of this process, as his many photographs show, are
marked. The old and debilitated animals become well, lively, vigorous,
and belligerent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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