The story of the doctor who became a multi-millionaire by sewing monkey testicle slices into people. I wish I was joking.
There was this Russian-French surgeon named Serge Voronoff. He wasn't some back-alley crackpot, he was actually a highly respected doctor who studied under Nobel prize winners. But he had this obsession with aging. He basically decided that the reason men get old and tired is because their testicles stop working as hard (I guess?). His solution wasn't vitamins or exercise. No, his big idea was to take testicles from baboons and chimpanzees, slice them extremely thin like carpaccio, and graft them onto the testicles of human men.
The logic was that animals have this raw, primal energy, and by attaching a piece of that "essence" to a human, the human would absorb the youth. And the craziest part is that people bought it. Hook, line, and sinker.
Voronoff became an absolute celebrity. He performed thousands of these surgeries. We’re talking about world leaders, ultra-wealthy industrialists, and politicians paying the equivalent of a house to get this done. He got so rich he rented out an entire floor of one of the most expensive hotels in Paris with his entourage and eventually bought a castle. He even had to set up his own monkey breeding farm in Italy because he was running out of chimps. Imagine being a neighbor to that castle.
The funny thing is, it "worked" for a while. It was basically the most expensive placebo effect in history. These guys would walk out of the clinic with a sliced chimp ball in their sack and feel like absolute kings. They claimed their memory was sharper, they had the energy of a 20-year-old, and obviously, they bragged about their performance in the bedroom. Biologically, it was nonsense—the human body usually rejected the tissue and it turned into scar tissue within months—but the ego boost was enough to convince them it was working. There was even a cocktail named after the procedure called the "Monkey Gland" that you can still order in some old-school bars.
It honestly makes you think about all the biohacking stuff we see today. Like that tech millionaire Bryan Johnson who was swapping blood with his son recently? We like to think we're so much smarter now, but honestly, humanity hasn't changed at all. Rich people are still terrified of dying and they will pay any amount of money if you sell them a good enough story about eternal youth. It’s just wild to think that huge decisions in the 1920s were probably made by guys sipping brandy who secretly had a piece of a baboon inside their pants.
Anyway just wanted to share because it blew my mind that this was considered peak science back then. Definately makes you wonder what medical trends we do now that people will laugh at in 100 years.
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