Manufactured Masculinity

Primitive people from time immemorial have eaten the hearts, livers and testicles of ferocious beasts and valorous enemies. Believers in sympathetic magic, they sought thus to acquire strength and bravery. Scientific minds saw no sense to this until about 75 years ago Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard (1817-94) concluded that such a diet somehow made men of weaklings. He sought the reason and found a testicular secretion which in infinitesimal amounts did what the whole gland could do. That potent quintessence came to be called a hormone. Other glands in the body were soon found to produce secretions of similar potency. Thus born was the modern science of endocrinology.* Since Brown-Sequard's original demonstrations more and more hormones have been discovered. They occur in the pineal gland in the middle of the brain; in the pituitary gland under the forebrain; in the thyroid, parathyroids and thymus in the neck; in the adrenals on top of the kidneys; in the pancreas at the stomach; in the stomach and intestines; in the ovaries and testicles. These hormones always work together. The pattern of their complicated interbalance makes every human being precisely what he is. The balance changes during life, making the baby a boy, the boy a youth, the youth a man, the man a dotard. Disease or accident, food or medicine may alter the balance. Then one may be smarter or duller than natural, thinner or fatter, more brave or more backward. A woman with an overactive thyroid is a busybody with a quick pulse, a temperature slightly above normal. She wants to wolf all kinds of food. The doctor may quiet her by dosing her neck with x-rays or the surgeon may cut out part of her goitre. Dosing with hormones is less brutal than surgery. Doctors begged pharmacologists to give them in pure form the active principles of the endocrine glands. When Chemist Edwin Calvin Kendall of the Mayo Clinic isolated thyroxin, the essence of the thyroid, about 15 years ago, a loud cry of applause arose. Since then other hormones have been refined and analyzed. Last week Professor Leopold Ruzicka of Zurich significantly reported in Nature that he had synthesized the male sex hormone. To get it, this altogether reputable scientist attacked hydroxy-ketone, a substance related to acetone, with dihydrocholesterol which is a derivative of cholesterol found in bile, brains and eggs. Nicely controlled chemical procedure produced a modified hydroxy-ketone which he claims is chemically identical with the male sex hormone. Whether it can be used alone or whether, like natural sex hormones, it works best in combination with pituitary, thyroid or adrenal cortex medication, is something pharmacologists must determine. It probably will grow hair on a eunuch's chest. But there is no chance whatever that it will make him a father.

*Previous work on internal secretions, however, had been done as early as 1849, by Claude Bernard.

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