For about 3,660 years, give or take a decade or two, sporadic attempts of prolonging life have taken place. For virtually all of those years, it’s been a case of males who have been attempting to stretch their years, along with some other things.
Somewhere between 1600 to 1800 B.C., presumably on the advice of their physicians, older Egyptian fellows began dining on the internal organs of young animals, hoping this would renew their aging parts. In India, the Hindu physician Sushruta concocted more than 700 meds, include soma, a mind-altering plant that perked up older brains, or at least helped the fellows accept their faltering thinking ability.
The Chinese developed a potent elixir with tiny pieces of gold in it. Around the first century B.C, they believed everlasting life would be gained by using gold utensils. The gold had to be transmuted from mercury, which, unfortunately, poisoned the patient.
In the 1400s, injections came into vogue. Men who could afford it opted for blood. Pope Innocent VIII, interested in living longer, lined up transfusions from younger fellows. Unfortunately, one or more of them had the wrong blood type, and the pope died within a few hours of the injections.
Greeks and Romans believed the breath of virgins would invigorate older guys. Then a Dutch physician topped them with his tonic in the eighteenth century. Dr. Hermann Boerhaave prescribed that an older man should sleep between two virgins to regain his vigor and prowess. Makes you wonder about the scope of pharmacy services in those days.
Serge Voronoff put a new twist on the practice of injecting testicle extract into older men. The Russian surgeon began grafting the testicles of monkeys on the men. Some grafts failed because of immunologic rejection. Another problem: many of the monkeys had syphilis. Despite these drawbacks, other practitioners adopted the grafts technique throughout the 1920s and ‘30s until people finally wised up.
Maybe it’s time for research on why women outlive men.
Comments