After an operation whereby ******'s glands were grafted into his body, Frank Klaus, former Middleweight Champion, will attempt to come back in the roped arena and regain his crown. "I never was in better physical health in my life than I am right now and I believe my vitality is stronger every day" he says. Klaus kept the operation a secret at first, no-one but his wife knew that the operation was performed. "I was advised by a friend who returned from France a few months ago to try the operation" said Klaus. "Through the aid of a prominent Pittsburgh doctor, who is at the head of one of the largest hospitals here, I had the job done." Klaus has had offers to fight in England and Belgium and will sail for the latter country next month. (The Milwaukee Journal - Feb 10, 1920) ...................................... "One of the most interesting chapters in the long history of the male hormone involves the medical career of Dr.Serge Voronoff, a Russian-French surgeon who earned an international reputationand a great deal of moneyback in the 1920s by transplanting slices of ****** testicles into aging men seeking a new physiological lease on life. Even today,many people who lived through the 1920s and 1930s will recall the term ****** glands and what it suggested about the men who sought to have them implanted on or near their own ***ual organs. The ****** gland operation played a very marginal and rather bizarre role in the sporting life of that period. A former middle-weight boxing champion of the world named Frank Klaus, clearly hoping for a comeback, publicly announced his own operation, but even the simian glands could not revive his career. Meanwhile, similar operations had been underway at San Quentin Prison in California. From time to time the testicles of executed criminals were transplanted into other inmates who were judged to be gland-deficient. At the prisons Thanksgiving Games in 1923, sports medical news was being made. As the medical historian David Hamilton reports: Gland transplanted inmates did well, and the seventy-year-old John Person, who was carrying an extra grafted testicle, came a good second in the fifty-yard dash, beating several younger inmates with only two testicles.
Ive read this before but I dont see how this is even possible. Sounds like quackery to me. I would think the body would reject something like that and a major life threatening infection would ensue.
I once read that Charlie Chaplin had ****** gland injections for virility. I very much doubt medical science was far enough advanced in Klaus's time to implant animal glands in humans.
not disagreeing...but if the story was printed in 1920, and if medical science wasn't that far advanced...how did the story come to be ?
This is something people actually had done. They would just make an incision in the scrotum and insert a small sliver of a ******'s testicle in hopes that it would impart fresh vitality. Because the testicles are cut off from the rest of the body's immune system, it is theoretically possible for the foreign tissue to graft itself into place. Obviously no one was ever able to show any real medical benefit.
I think it's clear by now Doug that what we really need to know is how this ******-infused superman would fare against Tokyo Douglas.
