An excerpt of interest

Today's Delancey Place

From the annals of science: in 1917, a cure was found for impotence and related maladies that involved transplanting the glands and testicles of goats, monkeys and humans into the patient. Though ultimately found to be fraudulent, it became a craze that swept across the U.S. and captured as patients a wide swath of Americans from movie stars to moguls:

"Ever since man began to walk upright, he had been obsessed when his penis would not behave likewise and searched for ways to fix the problem. The world's earliest known medical document, the so-called Edwin Smith Papyrus of Egypt dating from 1600 B.C., presents a strikingly sophisticated view of trauma surgery - except on the back, where one finds 'Incantation for Transforming an Old Man into a Youth of Twenty.' In ancient Greece an herb called satyrion, recommended by the philosopher Theophrastus in 320 B.C., was swiftly harvested to extinction. During the ensuing centuries cloves, ginger, and massaging one's genitals in ass's milk all had their vogue. In England around the year 1000, men were devouring 'love bread' (naked maidens romped in wheat, which was then harvested counterclockwise). The Middle Ages favored lubrication of the afflicted member with melted fat from camel humps. ...

"[For doctors experimenting in the 1910s], finding a human donor [of testicles for transplants to test a 'cure' for impotence] was actually easy, thanks to the help of Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at San Quentin prison in California. Three or four hangings a year offered the perfect chance to relieve relatively young men of their testicles without an argument. ... Testicles of these deceased felons were inserted into other prisoners, usually geezers with no chance of parole. According to Dr. Stanley's reports, most showed improvement. Seventy-two-year-old Mark Williams, half-senile at the implant, perked up within five days. ... Scientific journals, including JAMA, gave this work wide and respectful coverage. Dr. Stanley himself ... injected or implanted testicular material, both animal and human, into 643 inmates and 13 physicians. ...

"At the Park Avenue Hospital in Chicago in 1920, Dr. John Brinkley performed thirty-four goat-gland transplants, pausing often to chat with reporters. ... He had to say that his own technique, in which the goat gland 'humanized' in the scrotal sac, was 'far in advance of the Old World experts.' ... Dr. Stanley was now averaging fifty operations a month at $750 apiece, for a take of almost half a million dollars a year (in 1920s currency). Most patients walked in and lay down without even asking how the thing worked. 'I suppose a goat gland is a good deal like a potato,' said seventy-seven-year-old A.B. Pierce of Nebraska. 'You can cut a potato all in pieces and plant it and every eye will grow.' "

Author: Pope Brock
Title: Charlatan
Publisher: Crown
Date: Copyright 2008 by Pope Brock
Pages: 32-53

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Today's Delancey Place

I subscribe to a few daily email services of various types of information. Delancey Place is usually at least mildly interesting and sometimes fascinating. I thought today's entry was good, and want to share it with you. There is a link at the end to the Delancey Place home page, where you can find out more about it and subscribe if you'd like.

In today's excerpt--black and green tea:
"The earliest unambiguous reference to tea is from the first century BCE, some twenty-six centuries after Shen Nung's supposed discovery of tea. Having started out as an obscure medicinal and religious beverage, tea first seems to have become a domestic drink in China around this time. ...
"Tea is first mentioned [as an import from China] in European reports from the region in the 1550s. ... The first tea was green tea, the kind that had always been consumed by the Chinese. Black tea, which is made by allowing the newly picked green leaves to oxidize by leaving them overnight, only appeared during the Ming dynasty; its origins are a mystery. It came to be regarded by the Chinese as suitable only for consumption by foreigners and eventually dominated exports to Europe. Clueless as to the origins of tea, Europeans wrongly assumed green and black tea were two entirely different botanical species. ...
"Tea got its start [in England] when it became fashionable at the English court following the marriage in 1662 of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal. Her enormous dowry included the Portuguese trading posts of Tangier and Bombay, ... a fortune in gold, and a chest of tea. Catherine was a devoted tea drinker and brought the custom with her. ...
"It is not too much exaggeration to say that almost nobody in Britain drank tea at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and nearly everybody did at the end of it. Official imports grew from six tons in 1699 to eleven thousand tons a century later, and the price of a pound of tea was one-twentieth of the price at the beginning. ... [Consumption was actually greater than imports would indicate because of] the widespread practice of adulteration, the stretching of tea by mixing it with ash and willow leaves, sawdust, flowers, and more dubious substances--even sheep's dung, according to one account--often colored and disguised using chemical dyes. Tea was adulterated in one way or another at almost every stage along the chain from leaf to cup. ... Black tea became more popular, partly because it was more durable than green tea on long voyages, but also as a side effect of this adulteration. Many of the chemicals used to make fake green tea were poisonous, whereas black tea was safer, even when adulterated. As black tea started to displace the smoother, less bitter green tea, the addition of sugar and milk helped to make it more palatable."
Tom Standage, A History of the World in Six Glasses, Walker, Copyright 2005 by Tom Standage, pp. 178, 185-189.

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'Tis blessed to receive

I subscribe to a daily email from Delancey Place that brings, as the page header says, "eclectic little excerpts" to my inbox every day. I thought today's offering was particularly good.

John Steinbeck eulogizes his recently deceased friend, Ed Ricketts, who was the real-life model for the character Doc in Steinbeck's novel, Cannery Row:
"I have tried to isolate and inspect the great talent that was in Ed Ricketts, that made him so loved and needed and makes him so missed now that he is dead. Certainly he was an interesting and charming man, but there was some other quality that far exceeded these. I have thought that it might be his ability to receive, to receive anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine. Because of this everyone felt good in giving to Ed--a present, a thought, anything.
"Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. ... It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it is well-done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving, you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.
"It requires self-esteem to receive--not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself."
John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Appendix, "About Ed Ricketts", Penguin Books, 1951, pp. 272-3.