HISTORY PAGES
Serge Voronoff , at the frontier and in advance of his time could not escape controversy though . He even became a legendary character in pop culture and Hollywood — including the prototype of Professor Preobrazhensky from Mikhail Bulgakov ’ s “ Heart of a Dog ”.
The controversy was triggered by the novelty of the strange and somewhat disturbing methods at attempting to attain longevity through surgical procedures and transplants .
But were his surreal methods all that horrific or did he actually discover an effective method for combating old age ?
Doctor Samuel Abramovich Voronov became a legendary character in pop culture and Hollywood .
FROM TAMBOV TO CAIRO
Samuel Abramovich Voronov was born in 1866 in Tambov province , Russia . The family was large and rather poor , but the parents managed to send the 18-year-old boy to study in Paris , at the University of France . In 1889 , Samuel was hired to work in the laboratory of the famous physician Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard — just in that year when Brown-Séquard began to experiment with subcutaneous injections of extracts from the testicles of guinea-pigs and dogs ( we must pay tribute to the 72-year-old professor : he performed his experiments on himself ). The injections were designed to stop age-related changes in an aging organism . The results of Brown-Séquard ’ s work were not strong enough to make Voronov believe that just injections were enough to rejuvenate . He believed instead that surgical intervention would be more effective . The young doctor from Russia continued his scientific research under the guidance of the French biologist and surgeon Alexis Carrel — the future Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology and Medicine ( 1912 ), an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences ( 1920s ), who in the 1930s turned into an ardent eugenicist , and in the 1940s supported the regime of Hitlerite Germany .
From 1896 to 1910 Samuel Voronov works in Cairo at the court of the ruler of Egypt , where , among other things , he studies the negative retarding effects that castration has on the male body , eunuchs being the main source of his research . The overwhelming majority of Egyptian eunuchs suffered from diseases and excess weight and died early , and this fact strengthened
Dr Serge Voronoff ( 1866 – 1951 ) Доктор Серж Воронофф
Voronov in the idea that clues to rejuvenation lay precisely in the work of the gonads . To prove his theory , he began to carry out operations to transplant the gonads from a young ram to an old one . Aged rams became alert and active , which convinced the doctor of the correctness of his assumptions and inspired further research on rejuvenation .
During this period , Voronov published a number of scientific works and textbooks on operative surgery and gynecology . Upon his return to France , from Cairo , in 1911 , Samuel , who had received French citizenship , was appointed head of the laboratory of experimental surgery and physiology at the Collège de France . Then he changed his name and became world famous as Serge Voronoff .
INITIAL SUCCESS WITH TRANSPLANTS ON THYROID PATIENTS
Voronoff began by transplanting slices of chimpanzee thymus glands into thyroid patients . In 1913 , a demonstration operation in the presence of several eminent colleagues was carried out to transplant a baboon gland to a boy
with congenital dementia , which gave an excellent result : the patient began to quickly catch up with his peers in development . This allowed the doctor to declare that his method can be used not only to rejuvenate the body , but also to improve it .
ACKNOWLEDGED SUCCESS IN REJUVENATION OF HUMANS BY HIS PEERS IN 1923
From 1917 to 1926 ( with a break for the First World War ), the doctor performed more than five hundred operations on sheep , goats and bulls , inoculating old animals with “ thin slices ” of the testicles of young individuals . Voronoff noted that as a result of this intervention , the old animals regained their former “ agility and playfulness .“ He also believed that monkey gland transplantation could be used to treat dementia .
Before that he had transplanted the testicles of executed criminals to millionaires and , when demand exceeded his supply , began using tissue from monkey testicles .
In 1923 , 700 famous surgeons from all over the world applauded Voronoff ’ s success
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