The Goat-gland Transplantation: As Originated and Successfully Performed by J. R. Brinkley, M. D., of Milford, Kansas, U. S. A., in Over 600 Operations Upon Men and WomenFlower, Sydney Blanshard
History
The Goat-gland Transplantation: As Originated and Successfully Performed by J. R. Brinkley, M. D., of Milford, Kansas, U. S. A., in Over 600 Operations Upon Men and Women
Flower, Sydney Blanshard
Brinkley, John Richard, 1885-1942; Transplantation of organs, tissues, etc.
In a rat it is the sexual impulses that are directly reanimated. He
again knows the fevers of courtship, the conflicts of marriage; and
whether he is glad to repeat these commotions depends on the rat. In
man, however, the sexual impulses are more or less sublimated, so that
the new energy may appear in any of the other forms of psychic activity.
Whatever such faculties he has in him once more grow strong.
* * * *
How wonderful it would be if we could at least prolong certain
lives--great writers like H. G. Wells and Conrad, great artists, great
doctors. But in practice, the men who would get hold of this would be
John D. Rockefeller and W. J. Bryan. The rich uncle would walk in and
tell his hopeless heirs he had been to see Steinach. Senators would live
forever. The world would grow harder for youth.
Even were we able to control all this, and reserve the boon for the
best, would it work? Say we did choose the right men--is it not too
intimate a suggestion that we should set a man of science upon them,
prepared with a little knife to slice one of their genital ducts? Men
have fought all these years for the right to live. Have they no right to
die? Must an old man who is needed by the public be condemned to live
on, his aged cells stirred and restirred while we glean his brains bare?
Some Socrates of the future may yet envy that other his hemlock.
* * * *
This, we say it regretfully, is the end of Mr. Day's article. It is
admirable fooling. We will not pay his wit the poor compliment of taking
him seriously at the last and pointing out to him that it was Heine who
said, "Nobody loves life like an old man!" There will be no need of
insistence to urge the old men, useful or useless, to submit to an
operation to renew their youth. But it is to be hoped that they will
never be asked to submit to the cutting of the genital duct. It seems to
the writer that +The Athenaeum+ must have misconstrued Dr. Steinach's
experiments in some degree, inasmuch as it is difficult to conceive of
the operation of severing a genital duct as conducive to cell-formation.
However, probably ligating is meant instead of severing. But this is not
the point really brought out by Mr. Day's clever article. The real point
is, Is it likely that if Mr. John Jones takes Dr. Brinkley's goat-gland
operation for the renewal of his youth, and thereby adds thirty years to
his life, and at the end of this thirty years of friskiness undergoes a
second transplantation of glands, thereby gaining twenty years more, and
at the end of this twenty years takes the operation a third time,
securing a further lease of gaiety for ten years, will the final years
of Mr. John Jones be years of acute psychic senility, as observed by Dr.
Steinach in his rat? To the writer it seems a +non sequitur+. The cases
are not parallel. The rejuvenated rat appears to regard his acquired
vitality as impelling toward revelry and excess. It is necessary to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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