Any time you hear the term "monkey glands" in some old movie, you can be sure it's a reference to Dr. Serge Voronoff, whose work became famous in the 1920s. The Russian-born French surgeon was a pioneer in transplanting organs- although the organs he was transplanting were animal testicles, or parts of them, into human scrotums. It wasn't in order to replace a man's gonads, but to "rejuvenate" them.
The first official transplant of a monkey gland into a human body was performed on June 12, 1920. Three years later, Voronoff’s work was applauded by more than 700 scientists at the International Congress of Surgeons in London. The transplantation of living cells, tissues or organs from one species to another had become a experimental trend in the field of medicine as early as the end of the 19th century. Around this time, Voronoff had been studying the effects of castration in Egypt, which would later inform his work on rejuvenating treatments. By 1920, he was conducting his first transplants between chimpanzees and humans. For a brief time, he was using the testicles of executed criminals to transplant into his wealthy clients, but when the demand eventually became too great, he had to open a monkey farm breeding facility on the Italian Riviera. During his career, Voronoff also performed testicular transplants on more than 500 goats, rams and bulls, claiming the results showed that implanting organs extracted from young specimens into older animals had a revitalising effect on the latter. He proceeded to convince himself (the world’s elite) that he had discovered a method to slow down the process of ageing.
Thousands of men trusted Voronoff enough to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have monkey glands added to their bodies. This enabled Voronoff to expand his experiments to woman. Read about the monkey gland doctor at Messy Nessy Chic.