A Curious History of Sex

Spilling the Beans ^{Orgasm and Onanism}

The female orgasm is often spoken of as if it were a hidden treasure to be found only with the aid of maps, detailed instructions and a packed lunch. The intrepid sexual adventurer boldly sets out, like Indiana Jones, to navigate the mystery of the female body, read the clues, solve the puzzle and choose wisely before drinking from the Holy Grail. The male orgasm, on the other hand, is spoken of in terms of a bottle of Coke: shake it up until it explodes out the end and makes everything sticky. Job done.

Almost all slang terms for orgasm throughout history refer to male orgasms, rather than female. When it comes to orgasm slang, women share with men rather than owning their own: cumming, spending, climaxing, orgasming, etc. are all unisex, with the possible exception of squirting. While there are thousands of nouns for semen, how many can you think of for the natural lubricant women secrete during sex? It doesn’t even have a word of its own in English. In medical parlance, it’s called vaginal mucus, or vaginal secretion. The French call this fluid cyprine, from ‘Cyprus’, the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love. Not to be outdone by the French, Roger’s Profanisaurus arrived in the 1990s to nourish the English lexical wasteland with such gems as ‘fanny batter’ and ‘gusset icing’. However welcome such additions may be, the fact remains that slang for semen and the male orgasm could fill a dictionary, and the female equivalent could fill a footnote.

Perhaps it’s not too surprising that male and female orgasms are discussed in very different terms. Elisabeth Lloyd’s comprehensive analysis of thirty-three studies of sexual behaviour, conducted over the past eighty years, reveals that up to 80 per cent of women have difficulty orgasming from vaginal intercourse alone and between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of women never experience an orgasm.^{1} Ever. To date, there have only been a handful of studies into the orgasms of trans women after penile-inversion vaginoplasty, but this research has shown that 18 per cent of trans women could not orgasm by masturbation alone, 14 per cent of trans women complained of anorgasmia, and up to 20 per cent experienced difficulty orgasming post-surgery.^{2} Studies have shown that most women require at least twenty minutes of sexual activity to climax and there are myriad factors that can kibosh a lady’s snap, crackle and pop: age, stress, atmosphere, smells, self-esteem.^{3} Frankly, it’s a known flight risk.

Comparably straightforward a male orgasm may be, but the history of male orgasm is anything but simple. The historical understanding of what happened to a man’s body and soul once he had ‘blown his beans’ (1972) is a dark and deeply troubling one. From the medieval theologians who actually recommended beans to cure impotence as they believed an erection was caused by air inflating the penis, to Roman priests of Cybele who castrated themselves in frenzied ceremonies, it’s been a bumpy ride for the ‘hot rod’ (1972). But it’s the link between orgasm and energy that I want to focus on here, the ancient theory that orgasm weakens a man’s strength and drains his masculine virility. You know the one. In Rocky (1976), the Italian Stallion’s legendary trainer, Mickey, tells him ‘women weaken legs’.^{4} British sprinter Linford Christie used to say making love the night before a race made his legs feel ‘like lead’.^{5} Boxer Carl Froch abstained from sex for three months before knocking out George Groves in their world title fight.^{6} Each world cup, rumours abound about which coach has imposed a nookie embargo on his players before a match.

It’s important before going any further to state that there is absolutely no scientific data to support this theory. A 2016 systematic review of all the current scientific evidence on the effects of sexual activity on sport performance found that ‘evidence suggests that sexual activity the day before competition does not exert any negative impact on performance’.^{7} The New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel once said, ‘it’s not the sex that wrecks these guys, it’s staying up all night looking for it’.^{8} However, the myth persists.

The theory that orgasm creates an energy leak stretches back to ancient China and Taoism. A key belief within Taoism is seminal vitality (yuan ching), and that semen must not leave the body, but be reabsorbed to nourish the brain (huan jing). While a man is encouraged to have sex, he must not orgasm if the life force is to be preserved. The Classic of Su Nu (c. AD 200–500) is a text in the form of a debate between the Yellow Emperor and the goddess Su Nu. The emperor asks the goddess how he can preserve his vital energies, and she tells him to cease ejaculating during sex.

Taoism taught that ingesting vaginal secretions would strengthen the Yang (male) essence. Therefore, pussy was not only celebrated, it was a superfood. Suck on that, kale crisps. Semen retention is still widely practised in Taoism and Neotantra groups today, who believe energy and health can be increased by corking the cum. But before you all start saving up your ‘axel grease’ (1983) for some cosmic spunk dump, research from Harvard University has linked not ejaculating with a marked increase in prostate cancer. ‘Men who ejaculated 21 or more times a month enjoyed a 33 per cent lower risk of prostate cancer compared with men who reported four to seven ejaculations a month throughout their lifetimes.’^{10} An Australian study had similar findings, and found that men who ejaculated four to seven times a week were 36 per cent less likely to develop prostate cancer than men who ejaculated less than two or three times a week.^{11} But I digress.^{12}

The Ancient Greeks and Romans also believed that constantly ‘cracking your marbles’ (1967) was damaging to your health and depleted essential energy reserves. Hippocrates taught that a healthy body required a balancing of the humour fluids (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm). Logically, losing too much ‘baby juice’ (1901) could disturb this delicate balance and affect health. Aristotle believed that too much sex activity could stunt your growth. Plutarch advised men to ‘store up his seed’. Plato wrote, ‘if any man retains his semen, he is strong, and the proof is athletes who are abstinent’. To make sure there were no nocturnal emissions, Galen recommended athletes sleep on lead plates.

This belief persisted throughout the Middle Ages. St Albert the Great (1200–1280) firmly believed that ‘coitus drains the brain’, and that dogs followed lustful people around as ‘the body of a person who has had a great deal of intercourse approaches the condition of a cadaver because of all the rotten semen’.^{13} Of course, if you could lose too much ‘dilberry’ (1811), conversely you could have too much of the stuff, which would also unbalance the humours. In 1123, the First Lateran Council imposed compulsory celibacy on all priests. As you can imagine, this decree was met with considerable opposition from the clergy, and medical reasons were often cited. Gerald of Wales was archdeacon of Brecon in the twelfth century and wrote of a number of cases where celibacy had caused the death of various priests and bishops. Gerald recorded the death of an archdeacon of Louvain, whose ‘genital organs swelled up with immeasurable flatulence’ because of his vows of celibacy.^{14} The archdeacon refused to break his vows, and died shortly afterwards. This is by no means the only example of such medical advice in medieval Europe. It may seem strange that the Church would encourage sex, but the medieval Church understood lust to be sinful, whereas sex was essential to fulfil God’s command to ‘go forth and multiply’; so functional, fun-free intercourse was the order of the day. The medieval Church operated like a semen satnav, directing a chap’s ‘duck butter’ (1938) to its lawful uterine destination with minimal wrong turns and in the most efficient way possible. Semen that had missed its mark was dangerous stuff indeed. Some medieval theologians taught that demons stole semen from masturbators and couples practising coitus interruptus, and used it to impregnate women. St Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica wrote that demons took the form of beautiful women called succubi, inflamed lust in men, seduced them and harvested his seed.^{15} Then the demon would take the form of a man (incubus) and impregnate a willing woman.

This nice little theory is repeated and expanded upon in Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger’s guide for hunting witches, The Malleus Maleficarum (1487). Although the text acknowledges that men can be witches too, it argues ‘a greater number of witches is found in the fragile feminine sex than among men’.^{16} It goes on to argue that unlike men, women ‘know no moderation in goodness or vice’, and that ‘all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable’.^{17} The fear of women dominating men, castrating them or stealing their ‘oyster soup’ (1890) and draining their strength runs throughout the Malleus. ‘And blessed be the Highest Who has so far preserved the male sex from so great a crime: for since He was willing to be born and to suffer for us, therefore He has granted to men the privilege.’^{18} The fear that an orgasm drained men of their strength is palpable.

But it is easy to understand why orgasm would be linked to a loss of strength and potency. The French call an orgasm la petite mort (the little death), and with good reason. Ask yourself how you feel after orgasm when the mist has lifted. I’m generalising but, for those of us with vulvas, the orgasm is like an end-of-level boss; a violent showdown, after which we level up and want more – only harder. Though many women experience painful sensitivity in the genitals post-orgasm, we can keep going and, as Cosmo keeps assuring us, can achieve multiple orgasms. But once the penis has ‘shot his snot’ (1709) it’s all over, and before you can say ‘I’m ready, darling’ he is snoring in the wet patch. This special time is known in medical terms as the ‘male refractory period’. It is defined as ‘the transient period of time after ejaculation associated with detumescence, reduced interest in sexual activity, inability to ejaculate or experience orgasm, and increased aversion to genital sensory stimulation’.^{19} The finger of blame for this period is often pointed at central serotonin and prolactin fluctuations in the brain. But as pre- and post-orgasmic elevations in prolactin and serotonin are observed in both men and women, this is not regarded as an explanation as to why men and not women experience a refractory period.^{20} Whatever the reason, the MRP is very real, and the post-orgasm crash from super horny sex god to sleeping bear seemed irrefutable proof that an orgasm sapped men of their potency.

This all seemed perfectly obvious to Dr Samuel-Auguste Tissot when he published Onanism: A Treatise on the Maladies Produced by Masturbation in 1758. Tissot argued that semen was a vital body fluid, and that masturbation was the most damaging way to lose precious liqueur séminale. The picture Tissot painted of a man who ejaculated too frequently is not a pretty one. He argued excessive masturbation, nocturnal emission and coitus interruptus caused the body to simply waste away:

Tissot’s work set in motion a crusade against masturbation that would last for the next two hundred years. The solitary vice, self-pollution, onanism, or ‘jerkin the gherkin’ (1938) would come under increasing medical scrutiny and men’s soft-and-danglies were subject to various quack cures, ranging from the mildly amusing to the outright dangerous.

By the nineteenth century, medical theories that a loss of semen was seriously injurious to health had been firmly established. Physicians all over the Western world were warning that masturbation was not only dangerous, but could be fatal. Dr Léopold Deslandes (1797–1852), for example, wrote that ‘the patient is unconscious of his danger, and perseveres in his vicious habit – the physician treats him symptomatically, and death soon closes the scene’.^{22}

Men were warned to conserve their ‘essence’ by avoiding fornication and masturbation, and by limiting sex within marriage. Numerous anti-masturbation devices were available to prevent ‘nocturnal emissions’, or to stop young boys interfering with themselves. Physicians are recorded as applying acids, needles and electric shocks to the penile shaft in an attempt to cure what was then known as ‘spermatorrhea’ (weakness caused by loss of semen). Sparse diets were recommended to subdue lust, and purity crusaders such as John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) manufactured plain cereals to suppress urges. Kellogg argued that masturbation could cause all manner of illnesses, from cancer of the womb to epilepsy, insanity and impotency. But Kellogg went much further than just peddling a cock block in a box. He was full of useful information for parents on how to ‘cure’ a child from masturbating.

But the method Kellogg felt most successful in stopping the ‘knuckle shuffle’ (2001) was circumcision – without anaesthetic.

If women were habitual masturbators, Kellogg recommended burning out the clitoris with carbolic acid as an ‘excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement, and preventing the recurrence of the practice’.^{25} It is in no small part thanks to anti-masturbation crusaders, such as Kellogg, that circumcision is still so widespread in America today. Although circumcision rates are declining, almost 80 per cent of American babies are circumcised today. It’s important to remember that doctors like Kellogg truly believed they were helping people, and that orgasms were debilitating.

The 1911 Boy Scout Handbook by Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941) devoted an entire chapter to instructing young boys in ‘storing up natural forces’ in order to conserve ‘power and manliness’.

Although the Boy Scouts were still being cautioned not to ‘box the Jesuit’ (1744) right up to the 1950s, the early sexologists were already dispelling masturbation myths. In 1908, Albert Moll identified four phases of orgasm, and defined orgasm as a ‘voluptuous acme’ that gave way to a ‘sudden cessation of the voluptuous sensation’ and detumescence.^{27} Wilhelm Reich described orgasms as a ‘bioelectric discharge’ and the work of Kinsey revealed that masturbation was an almost universal human experience.^{28} It was the work of Masters and Johnson in 1966 that finally revealed exactly what happens to the male body before, during and after orgasm, and identified the ‘refractory period’.^{29} And while you may hesitate to bring up the subject of rubbing your nubbin over tea with the vicar, I like to believe we’re now in a place where ejaculation and masturbation are no longer subjects shrouded in mystery and shame.

But better than that, new science is emerging all the time to show how important orgasm is within human relationships. In 2004, Bartels and Zeki demonstrated that the areas of the brain activated during orgasm are also activated when looking at pictures of the person’s lover.^{30} The work of Komisaruk and Whipple (2008), Kurtz (1975) and Yang et al. (2007) all show that the brain activity during orgasm in humans and animals is linked to memory consolidation, meaning orgasms bond partners together.^{31} The work of Genaro (2016) builds on this and demonstrates that orgasm is key to pair-bonding partners, even in developing an attraction to certain ‘types’.^{32} In 2007, Stuart Brody studied the vaginal orgasms of some 1,256 women and concluded regular orgasms led to ‘greater satisfaction’ with sex life, mental health and general well-being.^{33} In 2011, Cindolo et al. showed that not ejaculating regularly led to a notable decline in the micturition reflex (the ability to pass urine from the body). One study found that 32 per cent of 1,866 US women who reported masturbating in the previous three months did so to help them go to sleep. The same study also found that orgasm can increase levels of endorphins and corticosteroids that raise pain thresholds, easing discomforts associated with arthritis, menstrual cramps, migraine and other conditions.^{34} In 2001, research showed that orgasm relieved the pain of migraines or cluster headaches for up to a third of patients.^{35} And I have only just scratched the surface of research into why an orgasm is good for you.

So please, ‘walk your ferret’ (1785), ‘flub your dub’ (1966) and ‘pull your pud’ (1986); as long as no one else on the bus minds, orgasm to your heart’s content. It’s medically recommended. And every time you do, think of your orgasm as a tribute to all those before you who have paid an incredibly high cost for enjoying what Quentin Crisp called the ultimate ‘expression of self-regard’.^{36}

Gland Larceny ^{Testicular Transplants in the Twentieth Century}

The link between ejaculating too often and a physical decline in health was an established medical fact until the twentieth century. So, what was a chap to do if his sexual potency had been drained and his manhood was in need of a reboot? An obvious remedy for depleting semen levels was to restock the reserves. The early twentieth century saw a medical craze for surgically rejuvenating ageing men by operating on their genitals to increase the amount of semen and/or sex hormones in the body. Depending on which physician you opted to visit, this could mean being subjected to a bilateral vasectomy, or having a monkey testicle grafted into your scrotum. These were the early days of endocrinology and hormone replacement therapy, and the doctors pushing these procedures touted them as a fountain of youth, albeit a fountain full of semen. But before you head off to look up ‘monkey balls’ on eBay, you should know that these procedures were discredited by the 1930s, when they were found to cause more harm than good (for both humans and monkeys alike).

In the 1880s, French physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817–1894) started injecting himself with testicular extracts from guinea pigs and dogs.^{1} He called his concoction the ‘elixir of life’, and believed it would replenish his own ‘seminal losses’. ‘I put forward the idea that if it were possible without danger to inject semen into the blood of old men, we should probably obtain manifestations of increased activity as regards the mental and the various physical powers.’ He continued:

Convinced the ageing process could be reversed by boosting semen in the body, Brown-Séquard started to experiment on animals, trying to graft parts of guinea pigs into male dogs, and injecting ageing rabbits with the blood or semen taken from the testicles of younger rabbits, that kind of thing.^{3} Convinced all this seminal swapping was having a positive effect on his subjects, Brown-Séquard began injecting himself with a mixture of blood, semen and ‘juice extracted from testicles’ of dogs and guinea pigs.

Immediately after these injections, Brown-Séquard reported being able to work for longer hours, experienced an increase in mental focus, and, at the age of seventy-two, could run up and down stairs again. Brown-Séquard published his findings in The Lancet, and legitimised organotherapy as a credible medical discipline.^{5}

Brown-Séquard may have been an early pioneer, but the man responsible for making surgical rejuvenation mainstream was the Russian-born French surgeon Serge Voronoff (1866–1951). Voronoff was a laboratory director at the prestigious Collège de France when he made his name implanting monkey testicles into men who complained they were not as sprightly as they used to be. An expert manipulator of the press, Voronoff’s work became the subject of intense media focus around the world.

Before turning his full attention to monkey ‘bollocks’ (1000), Voronoff was a respected gynaecologist and had pioneered new surgical techniques in Les Feuillets de Chirurgie et de Gynecologie (1910). Influenced by the work of Brown-Séquard, Voronoff began experimenting on animals to see if grafting testicle glands from one animal into the body of another held rejuvenating properties. Convinced that it did, Voronoff presented his findings to the French Surgical Congress in 1919. Le Petit Parisien reported his findings the next day.

After repeating his experiment hundreds of times on sheep, dogs and bulls, in 1920 Voronoff began transplanting monkey glands into humans. He had originally wanted to use human testicles, taken from corpses and criminals, but soon realised he would never be able to secure a regular supply, so monkey nuts it was. Eventually, Voronoff had to buy a monkey colony near Nice to keep up with demand.^{7}

The procedure was as simple as it was horrific. The chimp’s testicle would be removed and finely cut into longitudinal segments. An incision was then made into the patient’s scrotum to expose the testicles and membranes. The cut-up chimp testes were implanted underneath the tunica vaginalis membrane, and the incision was sewn back up. The theory was that the monkey glands would be absorbed directly into the patient’s own sex glands. The monkey was euthanised.

Voronoff knew the value of customer testimonials, and in his 1924 book, Forty-Three Grafts From Monkey to Man, he meticulously detailed his many successes, including a seventy-four-year-old Englishman, Arthur Liardet. Voronoff grafted a baboon’s ‘bobble’ (1889) into Arthur Liardet in 1921 and declared, ‘his man has truly been rejuvenated by 15 or 20 years. Physical state, genital vitality, all has radically changed from the results of the testicular transplant that transformed a senile old man, powerless and pitiful, into a vigorous man with all his capacities.’^{8} Despite being transformed ‘from tottering old age to the activity of a man in the prime of life’, Liardet died just two years later.^{9} Undeterred, in his 1925 book, Rejuvenation by Grafting, Voronoff declared that his ageing patients appeared fifteen years younger, and common ailments such as constipation, cramps, fatigue and colitis were all hugely improved. In cases of depression, post-surgery patients appeared to be ‘more alert, displayed increased vigour, jovial eyes, and had more energy’.^{10} Of course, one of the most commonly cited ailments Voronoff claimed to be able to cure was impotency and a lack of libido. One sixty-seven-year-old post-operative patient claimed that his sexual libido had returned to an ‘extraordinary degree’.^{11}

Despite Voronoff’s confidence, the scientific community were less and less convinced that sewing monkey balls into an old man’s scrotum was a good thing. Scientists began trying to replicate Voronoff’s remarkable success and couldn’t. French veterinary surgeon Henri Velu experimented with testicular grafting on sheep to try and improve their health, but found this only resulted in grumpy sheep. He presented his findings before the French Veterinary Academy in 1929 where he called Voronoff ‘delusional’. Similar studies in Australia and Germany also found gland grafting produced no positive effects.^{12} To make matters worse, Voronoff was denied a licence to operate in Britain on grounds of animal cruelty. Leading anti-vivisectionists in the UK denounced Voronoff as ‘an offence against morality, hygiene, and decency’.^{13}

But at least Voronoff was an established medical surgeon, which is more than could be said for the American John Richard Brinkley (1885–1942), who started grafting goat testicles into human subjects armed only with a bought medical diploma and a can-do attitude.^{14} Brinkley became known as the ‘goat gland doctor’, and made a great deal of money from convincing men he could restore their erection with a billy goat’s scruff. Inspired by the work of rejuvenists like Voronoff, Brinkley operated on hundreds of people (men and women) and given he really didn’t have the qualifications to be doing so, infections were common, and a number of patients died. Between 1930 and 1941, Brinkley was sued more than a dozen times for the wrongful death of a patient in his care.^{15} Eventually, Brinkley was exposed in court as a ‘charlatan and a quack in the ordinary, well-understood meaning of those words’, and was subsequently ruined by an avalanche of lawsuits.^{16} He declared bankruptcy in 1941, and died in poverty the following year.

While Voronoff escaped such a fate, by the closing years of the 1920s, the once great surgeon was attracting more mockery than praise. In 1928, shortly before Voronoff’s lecture series in London, George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to the London Daily News from the perspective of a monkey:

By 1929, Voronoff claimed to have carried out almost five hundred gland transplants, but he had lost credibility with the public and his peers. Not only was new research disproving his theories, but his patients continued to age, deteriorate and die. Eventually, Voronoff’s name faded from the press, his work was widely condemned, and he was painted as just another quack. Voronoff and his theories may be long gone, but in one final disturbing twist, it has been suggested that the vogue for transplanting monkey tissue into humans may have been responsible for transferring simian immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) from apes to humans, leading to the global AIDS crisis today.^{18}

Voronoff may have been one of the most notorious surgeons mangling scrotums in the quest for eternal youth, but he certainly wasn’t the only one.[20] Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach (1861–1944) believed that a bilateral vasectomy (tying the tubes of both testicles), would act like a kind of plug to keep semen in the body, which would boost a flagging sex drive. After experimenting on rats, Steinach refined his technique and moved on to human subjects. Steinach claimed his early experiments not only cured impotence, but his patients were younger, ‘more buoyant and alive’.^{19} Patients before the operation were described as being ‘subject to paralysing fatigue, disclination to work, failing memory, indifference and depression; all of which hinder or preclude progress and every kind of competition’, and, of course, they were ‘impotent’.^{20} The promise of eternal youth and a raging ‘hard-on’ (1864) are extremely seductive, and it’s little wonder the public responded to Steinach’s work so enthusiastically.

Word of the ‘Steinach operation’ soon spread and physicians such as Harry Benjamin, Robert Lichtenstern, Victor Blum and Norman Haire set up their own clinics and started twisting the ‘nuts’ (1704) of men across Europe and America. But not everyone was convinced surgical rejuvenation worked. In 1924, an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association denounced surgical rejuvenation as open to ‘abuse and fantastic exploitation’ and scorned those who ‘are willing to grasp at such new suggestions towards accomplishing an invigorating end’.^{21} But this didn’t stop several high-profile figures from going under the knife.

Sigmund Freud was reported to have undergone a vasectomy at the hands of Dr Victor Blum in 1923 to try and cure him of cancer.^{22} The Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) went to Dr Norman Haire in London for a bilateral vasectomy to try and boost his libido and the quality of his work. Shortly after the procedure, Yeats wrote to a friend that he now felt ‘marvellously strong, with a sense of the future’.^{23} However, Ethel Mannin, who had a brief relationship with Yeats after the operation, later pronounced the Steinach operation a ‘failure’.^{24} Ouch.

Failure or not, in the first half of the twentieth century, glands were big business. Newspapers reported huge consignments of rhesus monkeys being transported to Australia to ‘meet the demands of patients for rejuvenation operations’.^{25} In 1924, Dr William Bailey, director of the American Endocrine Laboratories, outlined seven possible methods for surgical rejuvenation to the American Chemical Society:

There was no shortage of surgeons who were willing to subject men’s ‘tallywags’ (1680) to all manner of quackery, but the Holy Grail (and most expensive) of the gland treatments was the transplant. Men feeling their youth slip away desperately clambered to get their hands on a pair of springy young gonads, through legal means, or not. The extent that some were willing to go to was laid bare in 1922.

On a bright summer morning in Chicago, in 1922, a man in his early thirties was found unconscious in a doorway at the corner of Ranch Avenue and Adam Street. Unable to rouse him, concerned residents took the man to the local country hospital where he was soon identified as Henry Johnson, an electrical employee who lived with his sister, Beryl Heiber. Johnson was examined by one of the hospital’s surgical interns who discovered that both Johnson’s testicles had been removed from the scrotal sack, and that the wound had been cleaned with antiseptic and ‘expertly’ stitched closed. Johnson recalled he had been drinking with a friend on Madison Street the night before. His last memory was getting into a streetcar to go home, and after that, everything was blank. Surgeons treating Johnson at the time believed he had been drugged prior to the attacks, and noted the level of surgical skill required to excise a man’s testicles without severing the testicular artery. Johnson was too embarrassed to report this to the police, and instead went home and returned to work.

Four months later in October, thirty-four-year-old Polish labourer Joseph Wozniak awoke lying in a vacant lot, with little recollection of how he came to be there. Wozniak had been out drinking with his friend Kuchnisky in Milwaukee Avenue, and the last thing he recalled was hailing a taxicab to go home. His head ached, he felt disorientated and he had a strong chemical taste in his mouth. Wozniak managed to stagger home to Seventeenth Street in the north of Chicago. A severe pain in his groin had grown steadily worse throughout the day until Wozniak admitted himself to hospital to be treated by Dr Sampolinski, who discovered that Wozniak’s testicles had also been removed. The strong chemical taste Wozniak had in his mouth was chloroform.

Shocked, Dr Sampolinski called the police, and as soon as the media picked up the story, Joseph Wozniak was reported around the world as a victim of ‘gland larceny’. Wozniak’s drinking buddy Kuchnisky was missing, and police believed he must have suffered a similar fate to his friend, but was too embarrassed to come forward and had gone into hiding. Upon reading about the Wozniak case in the papers, Henry Johnson came forward to report his attack. It quickly became apparent that not only were these cases linked, but they were most likely carried out by a surgeon.

The following year, there were two more attacks within twenty-four hours of each other. Taxi driver Charles Ream was drugged and had both testicles removed, and John Powell of North Chicago was mutilated, but escaped with his testes intact.

Leading physicians in the field of rejuvenation were swift to condemn and distance themselves from such barbarism. Voronoff himself stated that ‘the surgeon who did it should be compelled to suffer a like fate himself’.^{28} The case sent Chicago residents into a panic and the police braced themselves for ‘an epidemic of gland robberies like the Burke and Hare epidemic in [the UK]’. Fortunately, the epidemic never came, but the attackers were never caught.

Testicles were big business in the first half of the twentieth century and numerous products hit the market claiming to provide all the benefits of testicle grafting without the expense or having to go under the knife. And unlike beauty products today, these ones were proud to be full of bollocks. ‘Gland Extract Tablets’ promised ‘perfection without drugs’.

Gland face creams advertised themselves as being able to ‘permanently remove all traces of lines, wrinkles, crow’s-feet, sagging muscles, and all facial blemishes’.

Eventually, the craze for gland surgeries and gland-based beauty products fell out of favour. How many people and animals had their genitals mutilated in the quest for sexual potency and a less wrinkled forehead is unknown. Although the idea of grafting monkey bollocks into your own genitals may sound utterly horrific to us today, people still to turn to extreme and bizarre surgical options in an effort to stop the clock on old age. Plastic surgery, Botox injections, penis enlargement surgeries, vaginal tightening, and all manner of lotions, potions and woo-woo are sought out in the fight against old age and impotence. We might laugh at the gland surgeons, but I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t rub a cream made of testicles on my face if I thought it could knock out a few wrinkles. The twentieth-century craze for gland treatment is testament to both our insecurities and our vanity. Even at the height of Voronoff’s fame, there were those who urged people to reject such nonsense and embrace ageing with a bit of dignity – a sentiment that rings as true today as it did then.

Tough Love ^{Medieval Impotence Tests}

As we have seen, throughout history people have submitted to extreme treatments in order to try and combat impotence. But it was only when the US Food and Drug Administration approved Sildenafil (tradename Viagra) on 27 March 1998 that there was finally a treatment that worked. The advent of Viagra did more than offer hope to millions of men around the world, it medicalised erectile dysfunction. In fact, it’s thanks to Viagra that we even have the term ‘erectile dysfunction’. Until the blue pill revolution, no one had ‘erectile dysfunction’, they were simply ‘impotent’, and this had to be accepted as a fact of life along with a receding hairline and middle-aged spread. As Viagra’s advertising executive Ken Begasse Jr explained:

The effects of Sildenafil were discovered by accident when UK scientists at Pfizer were testing it as a cardiovascular drug to lower blood pressure. The irony that Viagra was once thought to lower anything at all is almost too delicious to bear, but it is true nonetheless. The drug works by increasing blood flow into the penis during sexual arousal, which means that ‘Captain Standish’ (1890) can steer into port, rather than capsizing in the shallows. This unexpected side effect was reported when members of the clinical trial refused to give the medication back to Pfizer.^{2}

It’s easy to make jokes about Viagra, but it has spearheaded a sexual revolution. According to the Pharmaceutical Journal, the drug has been prescribed for more than 64 million men worldwide. According to Time magazine, when the drug was first launched demand was so great that doctors had to use rubber stamps just to keep up with the prescriptions.^{3} Of course, we all know Viagra is used recreationally by silly sods who believe that popping a pill will morph their penis into a Power Ranger, but the drug wasn’t made for them. Viagra can offer more than the opportunity to ‘dance with your arse to the ceiling’ (1904). Successfully treating erectile dysfunction can have a dramatic effect on a patient’s mental health. In 2006, research published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that men treated with Sildenafil produced ‘substantial improvements in self-esteem, confidence, and sexual relationship satisfaction. Improvements in these psychosocial factors were observed cross culturally and correlated significantly and tangibly with improvements in erectile function.’^{4}

Today, a trip to the pharmacy or an online form may be all that stands between you and your happy ending, but things were far from this simple in a pre-Viagra world. The medieval Church looked on marriage (and indeed sex) as necessary to procreation. So central was sex to married life that the twelfth-century text on canon law, Decretum, listed impotence as grounds for annulment.[21] Divorce was all but impossible in the medieval world, and even if it was granted, neither party was allowed to remarry while the other one lived. But impotence was regarded as a lawful impediment to marriage if it was kept a secret from the wife when they wed. Next time you’re at a wedding and the officiator asks if anyone knows of any ‘lawful impediment’ why the couple cannot be joined, just remember that you are legally bound to inform the congregation if you know that the groom’s ‘winkie’ (1962) is on the fritz. Impotence suits allowed a medieval woman to take her husband to court to annul her marriage and, crucially, if the annulment was granted, both parties could remarry.^{5}

To the medieval Church this made perfect sense: no sex, no children, no point. However, this was not as easy as a wife announcing her husband couldn’t get it up, and packing his bags for the off. The Church did not trust women to tell the truth, and certainly did not like annulling marriage. As keen as they were that their flock ‘go forth and multiply’, several criteria had to be met before the Church would agree to a couple separating. The couple would usually have to be married for at least three years before a case could be brought. If the husband denied the charges, the wife would be requested to produce witnesses to testify that she was a truthful person. If the husband admitted that he was impotent, the couple’s neighbours would have to testify that they were of honest character, and they had seen no evidence to contradict the claims. And, crucially, the Church required ‘proof’ of the husband’s impotence.^{6}

But how do you ‘prove’ your husband wields a less than magic ‘Johnson’ (1863)? Today, a doctor may carry out a nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) test, an intracavernosal injection test or even order a Doppler ultrasound. But in the twelfth century, all that was required was a group of ‘wise matrons’, a priest and an event known as ‘congress’. Congress was required in most annulments proceeding from a charge of impotence, and it meant a group of women subjecting the accused man to a public examination and sustained efforts to rouse the beast. In Summa Confessorum, Thomas of Chobham (1160–1230) recommended the following:

The results of these tests can be found throughout medieval court records, and they do not make for comfortable reading. Take, for example, the 1370 case of John Sanderson of the city of York. John’s wife Tedia took her case to the ecclesiastical court, who ordered three women to inspect poor John’s ‘jiggle stick’ (1890). Congress was performed and the matrons reported the following back to the court:

In 1368, Katherine Paynel demanded her husband, Nicholas, be examined and unsurprisingly Nicholas refused to submit to this. However, this did not stop Katherine calling various witnesses to testify that Nicholas had never risen to the occasion. Thomas Waus told the court that Katherine had:

In 1292 in Canterbury, twelve women of ‘good reputation’ testified that Walter de Fonte’s ‘virile member’ was utterly ‘useless’. In 1433, at the trial of John of York, things got carried away when one matron:

In each case, the wife was granted her annulment and given permission to find a man who could ‘better serve and please her’.^{10}

Medieval canon law recognised two types of impotence: permanent impotence caused by a physical inability to have sex, and temporary impotence that was thought to be caused by witchcraft. For it was well known that impotence was often caused by magic, rather than by any personal failing on the man’s side.

Burchard, Bishop of Worms, warned of such things in his eleventh-century penitential:

As we have already seen, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s infamous witch-hunting manual, The Malleus Maleficarum (1486), has a lot to say about impotence, and devotes an entire chapter to how witches ‘impede the power of generation’. Using their dark powers, witches can dry up a man’s semen reserves or cast a spell to ‘magically injure the power of generation – that is, so that a man cannot have sex’.^{12} What’s more, according to Kramer and Sprenger, a witch can do much worse than simply cursing your ‘jumble giblets’ (1890), they can remove the entire penis if they feel like it. Or rather, they can bewitch the ‘gigglestick’ (1944) so it is ‘hidden by an evil spirit who uses the art of illusion so that they cannot be seen or touched’.^{13} Kramer and Sprenger address common gossip that some witches remove the ‘family jewels’ (1911) and keep them hidden in trees, nests or boxes:

They conclude that this too is achieved by causing victims to hallucinate, and that witches do not really keep ‘dicks’ (1836) in trees as pets. Given how fascinated witches seem to be with cursing the ‘dibble’ (1796), it is little wonder that magical causes had to be considered in a charge of impotence.

When Hincmar, the archbishop of Rheims (AD 806–882) was asked to advise on King Lothar of Francia’s attempt to divorce his wife, Queen Theutberga, he responded with the treatise On the Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberg. Here, Hincmar suggests that the king’s favourite mistress, Waldrada, had bewitched him into no longer having sex with his wife.^{15} Hincmar was certain that ‘sorceresses and magicians… working of the Devil’ could render a man impotent and prevent a marriage from being consummated. If this should happen, Hincmar recommended the couple ‘make a pure confession of all their sins to God and a priest with a contrite heart and humble spirit’.

One of the most famous cases of magically induced impotence was that of King Philip Augustus of France (1180–1223), who claimed he had been unable to consummate his marriage to Ingeborg of Denmark because he had been bewitched. By all accounts the king had been looking forward to marrying Ingeborg, yet the day after the wedding he wanted the marriage declared void. Three months after the wedding, Philip’s council had produced a spurious family tree to try and prove the king and Ingeborg were related and therefore couldn’t marry. When Ingeborg protested about this, the king naturally claimed he had been rendered impotent through magic. He later directly accused Ingeborg herself of witchcraft and of cursing him. None of this convinced Pope Innocent III and Philip was ordered to stay married to Ingeborg. Philip’s response was to lock Ingeborg away in the chateau of Étampes and marry Agnes of Merania in 1196. The pope was so enraged that not only did he refuse to recognise this marriage, but he ordered all churches in France to be shut up for nine months and imposed an edict that rendered any child born during this period illegitimate. After this scandal, Pope Innocent III ruled that marriage could no longer be annulled on grounds of magically induced impotence.^{17}

Wives continued to seek an annulment to their marriages on grounds of impotence until the eighteenth century, though the practice of congress was largely abandoned by the seventeenth century.^{18} However, penile humiliation continued to be a feature of the divorce court throughout the eighteenth century as the proceedings were often published as lurid erotica. Unscrupulous publishers such as Edmund Curll and George Abbot distributed numerous compilations of scandalous court records, including The Case of Impotency; and Cases of Divorce for Several Causes in 1714, and Cases of Impotency as Debated in England in 1719. ‘Wise matrons’ may no longer have been required to examine a chap’s ‘virile member’, but these texts made sure every detail of a husband’s sexual dysfunction was made public.

Viagra turned twenty years old in 2018, and this is surely something worth celebrating. The successful treatment of erectile dysfunction has allowed millions of people to get their mojo back. It is also worth remembering all those throughout history who have not been able to access such treatment, and how important sexual function is to a person’s well-being. If you ever pop a blue pill, please remember to give a full salute to all the ‘useless members’ who entered the history books because they were accused of not being able to enter anything else.