"What Am I Doing?"

Fifty years ago, in gay Vienna, two bold young doctors set out to uncover Sex.

Sigmund Freud tackled the tabooed problem like a scientific poet, using words to dig up the roots of personality and family ties. His young friend Eugen Steinach went at the job in more orthodox fashion, in a laboratory, cutting up white rats to discover the secret of sexuality in glands and juices. Steinach became professor of physiology at the University of Vienna. There he got interested in the idea of staving off old age, and, after many years of research, devised a sex-gland operation to "reactivate" failing men, thrice "reactivated" himself. Like Freud, he was denounced as a charlatan. Like Freud, he was chased from Vienna by the Nazis. But while Freud's notoriety slowly changed to fame, Steinach's fame has been tinged with notoriety.

After his friend Freud died last fall, 79-year-old Eugen Steinach puttered dismally about his Zurich refuge, giving hormone injections to barren cows. Deprived of his laboratory, he cried in despair: "What am I doing with my reactivated life?" Last week he tried to prove that in the past he had done great things. He published his first book addressed to laymen, an elegant volume called Sex and Life, garnished with pictures of dissected rats, rejuvenated dogs, and handsome Eugen Steinach.

Testicles consist of two types of tissue, seminal tubules, which produce spermatozoa, and interstitial cells, lying between the tubules. The interstitial cells produce sex hormones which tone up the whole body, stimulate masculine characteristics. Both types of tissue, according to Steinach, nourish at the expense of the other. Hence he conceived the idea of stimulating hormone flow by damming up the "antagonistic" seminal canals. This he did by ligating (tying off) and severing the main duct of the canals, known as the vas deferens. This "Steinach vasoligature" is a simple operation, takes only 20 minutes.

In the book are glowing accounts of some of the thousands of men who were "Steinached" during the roaring '20s. They changed, says Steinach, from feeble, parched, dribbling drones to men of vigorous bloom who threw away their glasses, shaved twice a day, "dragged loads up to 220 lbs.," even indulged in such youthful follies as "buying land in Florida."

Although Dr. Steinach was violently attacked by medical authorities ten years ago, hormone specialists today smile indulgently at the mention of his operation. They doubt his claim that four-fifths of his patients regained their virility, think suggestion was the more powerful factor. Certain it is that vasoligature does not relieve high blood pressure, angina pectoris (heart attack) or arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). Although Steinach's critics admit a few outstanding cases where vitality was restored to younger men, the tissues of old men cannot be made to grow profusely, let alone pour forth hormones.

Most devastating argument against vasoligature is frankly presented in his book by Steinach himself. "Injections of synthetic male sex hormone," he admits, "produce results similar to those achieved ... by means of vasoligature . . . the injection treatment offers the further advantage that it can be repeated whenever required." But, cries he: "[My work] is the foundation upon which the proud structure of present-day hormone research is reared."

Last week, in the British Medical Journal, Dr. Arthur Guirdham, superintendent of the Bailbrook House (for mental disorders) in Bath, England, described the remarkable results he obtained in treating four hopelessly insane men with male sex hormones. The patients ranged in age from 24 to 74, in symptoms from paranoia (madness) with delusions of persecution to melancholia. "With one partial exception . . . there was no physical indication such as hypogonadism [underdevelopment] for hormone treatment." They were given a series of injections of the synthetic hormones testosterone and androsterone.

Within a fortnight after the last injections, said Dr. Guirdham, the patients improved "far beyond my most sanguine expectations." After several more weeks of observation, they were all discharged from the hospital and went back to their work "self-confident," "cheerful," "intensely so cial."

Such glandular treatment, admitted Dr. Guirdham, was "on the shotgun basis, with a preliminary barrage of faith," but it probably had "a general dynamic action [in stabilizing] ... the nervous system." He urged his colleagues to experiment further with "pure hormones."

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