Odd this day
6 April 1934
It was on this day 91 years ago that W. B. Yeats got ‘Steinached’ — a partial vasectomy, designed to reinvigorate the 69-year-old poet.
Eugen Steinach was an Austrian endocrinologist (although, strictly speraking, he started out in the field before the early 20th century, when that term began to be used). He had discovered that castrating male guinea pigs could make them look and behave like females, and that transplanting guinea pig testicles into females could make them hump other guinea pigs — normally a behaviour restricted to the males.
As with many pioneers, however, not all his ideas made perfect sense. Extrapolating from his valid guinea pig findings, he hit upon the idea that homosexuality might be ‘cured’ if he took a testicle from a straight man and shoved it into a gay one. The procedure was not a success.
Steinach was not deterred, however, and came up with another idea: the Steinach vasoligature. This would tie off the vas deferens in one testicle, making the sperm-producing tissue shrivel up. The Leydig cells, where testosterone was produced, would compensate, producing a surge of male hormones, causing old blokes to be suddenly endowed with the vim and vigour of their youth.
He’d tried it on rats, so a colleague performed it on a 43-year-old who, according to Steinach’s later write-up, weighed
108 pounds, his musculature was weak … the hair grey and had fallen out on top.
The following year,
The ex-patient now drags loads of up to 220 pounds with ease. His muscles have developed extraordinarily. The hair on his head is thicker and his beard more strongly developed.
This was nothing to do with food shortages and flu in Vienna in the year of the operation, which were a thing of the past when the patient was revisited 12 months later. No, no: it was down to his gonads. Obviously.
Word spread, and men across the world headed for Austria to have their own tubes tied, and the placebo effect saw many of them reporting rejuvenation, and the feeling of being young and thrusting again.
Yeats was pushing 70, and had married Georgie Hyde-Lees, more than a quarter of a century younger than him, 17 years earlier. By this stage, though, according to one biographer (Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats: Man and Artist), “he was dejected and out of sorts”, and had gone over a year without writing anything. Yeats was convinced that the sexual urge and creative inspiration were linked, and was said to have a “disdain for science” (according to Micheál Mac Liammóir and Eavan Boland’s, W. B. Yeats and his World, 1971) — and regular readers will know that he had long had an enthusiasm for… well, let’s be honest: mystical bollocks.
So, for one reason or another, according to the British Medical Journal he
submit[ted] to that humbug Steinach.
Naturally, I was being cynical when I suggested earlier that the placebo effect might have anything to do with this. Good heavens, what was I thinking? William Butler soon had the energy to start composing verse again, to remark that
…and to embark on ‘close friendships’ with writer Ethel Mannin (35 years his junior) and Margot Ruddock (actress, 42 years younger).
(If you would like to make an off-colour joke here about the procedure making a vas deferens to his life and career, feel free. I shall not, for I am above such things.)
Dublin newspapers started to refer him as
the gland old man.
(Yes, sorry.)
…but he was dead less than five years later. Steinach was nominated for the Nobel Prize, more than once. He did not receive one.
