‘Men seeking monkey-glands’: the controversial xenotransplantations of Doctor Voronoff, 1910–30

‘Men seeking monkey-glands’: the controversial xenotransplantations of Doctor Voronoff, 1910–30

Catherine Rémy

« ‘Men seeking monkey-glands’: the controversial xenotransplantations of Doctor Voronoff, 1910–30 ». In French History (2014) 28 (2): 226-240

The French surgeon Serge Voronoff (1866–1951) made headlines in Paris during the 1920s for his attempt to transplant primate testicles in men lacking ‘virility’. Voronoff was known in Great Britain too, and a comparison of debates in France and Great Britain on the transplantation of primate glands reveals two different contexts of reception and innovation. In France, Voronoff’s experiments were generally accepted and resulted in a light-hearted celebration of the mixture of human and animal species (although accompanied by a revival of racism, which associated primates with Africans). In Great Britain, by contrast, xenotransplantation was rejected in the name of animal rights and the purity of the human race.

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Gradiva’s Gait: Tracing the Figure of a Walking Woman

Gradiva’s Gait: Tracing the Figure of a Walking Woman

Andreas Mayer

Critical Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Spring 2012), pp. 554-578

Many patients were surprised or confused by their first visit to Dr. Freud’s office. Lying on the famous couch, they found themselves surrounded by a plethora of objects and images they would never have associated with the business of the psychoanalytic cure. Statuettes, masks, and portraits from ancient times were arranged in showcases, on the shelves and on desks within a room whose walls were covered with depictions of mythological scenes and portraits of Freud’s mentors. The patient’s first impressions of this peculiar display, which has been faithfully preserved by Anna Freud in their last London home at Maresfield Gardens, were frequently strong ones. One of the most articulate of Freud’s patients, Hilda Doolittle, herself a lover of antiquities, did not hesitate to tell him how “overwhelmed and upset” she was to find him “surrounded by these treasures, in a museum, a temple.” During her own analysis, a variety of these “toys,” as she called them, seemed to act as replicas or “ghosts” of the figures appearing in her dreams or memories: “We are all haunted houses.”

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The Physiological Circus: On Knowing, Representing, and Training Horses in Motion in Nineteenth-Century France

The Physiological Circus: On Knowing, Representing, and Training Horses in Motion in Nineteenth-Century France

Andreas Mayer

Representations, Vol. 111, No. 1 (Summer 2010), pp. 88-120

Abstract: The late nineteenth-century debates about forms of dressage and the correct representa-tions of horses, using the circus as the major arena for testing and observation, provided a fertile groundfor the development of Etienne-Jules Marey’s physiology of locomotion. Marey claimed to revolutionizethe field of locomotion studies with mechanically produced representations, yet, as this essay shows, hismechanical reform of the study of bodies in motion was countered by the persistence of older forms of animalobservation and superseded by new anthropologies and psychologies of seeing.

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