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Cabinet Magazine Online - Vasectomania, and Other Cures for Sloth

The first Steinach operation was performed in 1918 by Steinach’s colleague Robert Lichtenstern on Anton W., a forty-three-year-old coachman who suffered from chronic fatigue: “The patient presented the appearance of an exhausted and prematurely old man,” Steinach reported in his book Rejuvenation Through Experimental Regeneration of the Aging Interstitial Gland (1920), which contained photographs of apparent metamorphosis.

“His weight was 108 pounds, his musculature was weak, and there was very little cushion of fat,” wrote Steinach in his report. “The skin was dull and conspicuously dry, the hair grey and had fallen out on top, scanty beard, lank hair growth on the trunk and extremities.” A year and a half after the operation, the coachman had put on thirty-five pounds. “The ex-patient now drags loads of up to 220 pounds with ease. His muscles have developed extraordinarily. The hair on his head is thicker and his beard more strongly developed. The head and face hair grow so quickly he has to have it cut and shaved twice as often as previously. … The skin appears soft, with fine down, pliable and moist. … This man with his smooth, unwrinkled face, his smart and upright bearing, gives the impression of a man at the height of his vitality.”

In case this transformation was attributed to suggestion, the operation was performed on Anton W. without his knowledge of its consequences and hoped-for effects. Nevertheless, other explanations are possible: the man’s progress might be ascribed to the near-famine and influenza epidemic that ravaged Vienna in the winter of 1918, but had eased up a year later.

In April 1923, the New York Times reported an “exodus to Vienna” of doctors who hoped to learn the secret of the Steinach operation. “The glamour of acquirement [of these surgical skills] at a great distance,” the Times observed, added to the “generous fee” doctors were able to charge back home. In the Roaring Twenties, thousands of Steinach operations were performed in the US and around the world, from Chile to India, and hundreds of books—most directed at lay readers—celebrated their supposed successes in optimistic patient histories and testimonials.

Fifty-six-year-old controller before (A) and after (B) the Steinach operation. From How to Restore Youth and Live Longer, by Serge Voronoff (1928).

On Yeats and Freud:

Sigmund Freud and W. B. Yeats were among the celebrity patients who were Steinached, an operation no more serious, according to another respected Viennese doctor who went under the knife, than having your hair cut. Freud had the operation in 1923, aged sixty-seven, in the hope that it would prevent the recurrence of the cancer of the jaw from which he suffered. He told Harry Benjamin this when the two men met in Vienna, and that he hoped it might improve his “sexuality, his general condition and his capacity for work.” In 1934, when Yeats was sixty-nine, he went to see Norman Haire in Harley Street for the snip. Not long afterwards, Haire invited a woman half Yeats’s age to dinner, so that Yeats could test out his newly regained sexual potency. It was apparently a success. Yeats spoke so often of the “second puberty” that he enjoyed, and the creative outpouring it engendered, that the Dublin press nicknamed him the “gland old man.” “It revived my creative power,” Yeats boasted, “it revived also sexual desire; and that in all likelihood will last me until I die.”