Old Print Article: Monkey Gland Specialist Flees Fascism (1941)

I can’t say the Russo-French “gland expert” Serge Voronoff was doing God’s work. The surgeon believed grafting monkey testicle tissue onto the testicles of men increased strength and improved appearance. He experimented with numerous other animals, believing, for example, that bull glands might contain the fountain of youth. He was a well-educated and respectable crackpot, lauded as a genius for the majority of the Twenties and Thirties, before being lowered abruptly from his pedestal.

The first two brief articles below from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle report on Voronoff while he was still widely respected, while the third shows him caught up in the sweep of history, forced in 1941 to leave behind his beloved monkey farm in France to flee fascists, who seized the primates.


From July 13, 1924:


From September 23, 1936:


From February 2, 1941: