10 stomach-churning ways to rejuvenate yourself
With the promise of radically extended lives within reach, I decided to take a gander into the land of rejuvenation attempts past. Disclaimer: in no way am I suggesting that the credibility of current versus past beliefs should be debated. I just find this reminder of how people have been chasing after youth and away from death since the dawn of history a fascinating insight into our survival instinct.
Even more charming, if in a slightly sinister way, is our ancestors’ inclination for turning preoccupations with sexual performance into the pivot of their efforts. From Spanish conquistadores to Chinese emperors, via psychopathic aristocrats and priapic scientists, here’s a round up of the ten most queasiness inducing anti-aging strategies ever adopted by man.
1. Ponce de Leon
The honor of being the most cited life-extensionist in the contemporary press goes to the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, whose 16th century quest to locate the fountain of youth has become the standard opening anecdote for articles on immortality and rejuvenation.
While it is not clear whether he was really looking for vitality-restoring waters or a Bahamian love vine thought to be aphrodisiac, his Munchausen-esque pursuits illustrate the lengths to which humans will go to beat the grim reaper.
Alas, Ponce checked out at the age of 47, but one thing he did manage to do for our greying baby-boomers: he discovered Florida. And perhaps he provided historical legitimation to their penchant for viagra.
2. Eastern rejuvenation efforts
Meanwhile in China, the ruling classes were poisoning themselves with arsenic and mercury, the chief ingredients of supposedly immortalizing elixirs.
The most famous victim of this craze was Qin Shi Huang, the guy who unified China and left us an amazing terracotta army. Qin was so fond of his potions that he wanted his tomb surrounded by rivers of liquid mercury, presumably without realizing how this substance would lead him to an early grave. His successors were none the wiser, and by the 18th century the practice had killed hundreds.
Given the youth of the victims (Qin succumbed to his alchemist’s ministrations at 39), it could be argued that these elixirs did do a great job at fending off old age.
3. Virgins
Not to be out-charlataned by their Eastern cousins, Europeans were pursuing rejuvenation by sleeping with virgins. Since old age was deemed to be the consequence of the body getting cold and dry, close contact with the warmth and moisture of a young lady was thought to bring back youth by osmosis. Whilst it sounds like quackery straight out of hell, the ‘procedure’ was credited to the Bible:
“Now king David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin . . . and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat”.
Since David’s victi… ehm, lover came from the town of Shunem, the practice of old men cuddling girls (intercourse wasn’t crucial) to reinvigorate their shriveling organs became known as Shunamitism. For the joy of aging pervs all over, this atrocity was prescribed by actual medical doctors until the 18th century.
4. The blood of virgins
If you think that virgins had it hard in Western Europe it is because you haven’t heard of a Hungarian lady called Elizabeth Báthory. Being a woman and presumably heterosexual, Elizabeth didn’t want to sleep with virgins: she wanted to bath in their blood.
After noticing that accidental contact with the bleeding wound of a young servant had rejuvenated the skin on the back of her hand, the countess devised a beauty regimen to replicate this feat. Specifically, she took to bathing in a tub filled with the gore of peasant girls she would kidnap from the villages surrounding her castle.
Perhaps because the ablutions were interrupted by her arrest in 1610, she failed in her quest and died grey and wrinkly at the age of 54.
5. Rejuvenation via animal sex gland injections
As the triumphant advance of positivism bulldozed the nonsense propagated by alchemists and priests, the Cartesian gentleman was provided with scientific options with which to restore his youth and especially — you have guessed correctly — his sexual prowess.
In 1899 Frenchman C. E. Brown-Sequard formed a company called Spermine, whose eponymous compound contained — you’ve guessed again — “semen”, as well as “calf’s heart, calf’s liver, bull’s testicles.” According to its inventor, experiments had demonstrated that injections of ground animal sex glands banished decrepitude and made patients do “everything [they] had not been able to do or had done badly on account of [their] advanced age”.
It didn’t take long before angry customers, who evidently could still not do whatever it was that they had not been doing well or at all for some time, turned on Brown-Sequard and his Spermine. The company folded like a cheap suit and a bunch of copycat snake oil dispensaries were charged with fraud.
6. Testicle implants: Rejuvenation 1.1
But society’s fascination with male sexual organs wasn’t yet dead or even moribund, and in 1919 a physician at San Quentin prison by the name of L.L. Stanley started experimenting with rejuvenation by transplanting the testicles of an executed murderer into a senile inmate. Apparently the results were so outstanding that more procedures quickly followed, and by 1928 Stanley’s tally was 50,000.
Although the medical journal Endocrinology reported that the treatment had been successful, these findings were subsequently discredited. But what blows my mind about this story is not that it took years to ascertain that the transplanted testicles were falling off, which of course would happen in the absence of anti-rejection drugs.
What blows my mind here is that nobody questioned the number of prisoners that the State of California was executing. Because the alternative to them being the source of the donor testicles would be that Stanley was singlehandedly running the most colossal organ trafficking operation in the history of time.
7. Testicle implants: Rejuvenation 1.2
While L.L. Stanley was chopping and sewing in the US, across the ocean someone who didn’t have ready access to smoldering corpses but exhibited a severe case of FOMO thought up a variant on the testicles cure: monkey gland grafts.
Dr. Serge Voronoff soared even higher than Stanley in the stratosphere of scientific quackery, writing dozens of papers, traveling the globe for conferences, and parading his most successful cases like circus freaks. In fact, Voronoff was so convinced that his method worked, and he was so good at convincing other people, that a Hungarian insurer rejected a client’s pension claim on the grounds that his implanted chimp testicles had rejuvenated him.
8. Vasoligation
And finally in this relentless orgy of testosterone fixation, a variation on the theme: if attaching the sexual organs of another human (or animal) to people was probably not going to work in the long run, what about rebooting what was already in place?
After dabbling in cross-gender gonad transplantation (mercifully only in guinea pigs), the Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach garnered international attention with a procedure that became known as “vasoligation”. Like the name suggests, Eugen’s stab at rejuvenation consisted in an unilateral vasectomy that would re-route sperm back into the body. As a result, patients experienced a “harmonic restoration of […] failing capacities”.
Next!
9. Dietary rejuvenation: If it ain’t blood it must be wine
The tamest cure on this list is the one recommended by 16th century Venetian aristocrat Luigi Cornaro. As most of us do, upon hitting 40 the nobleman decided it was time for moderation, for which he restricted his diet to 350g of food and 414ml of wine per day. Then, to spread the gospel, he authored a lifestyle guide titled “Discorsi della Vita Sobria”.
Two observations here: firstly, while the book’s English title is “Discourses on the Temperate Life”, the word ‘sobria’ in Italian doesn’t mean so much temperate as teetotal, which is quite a claim for someone who guzzles almost half a litre of wine between lunch and dinner. Secondly, isn’t this supposed to keep you at a comfortable cruising speed on cirrhosis express?
Either way, by dying at age 102 Cornaro validated those who, 400+ years later, would have an eureka moment and posit that lowering calorie intake extends life. True visionary.
10. The digestive juices of moth larvae…
…what a disgusting proposition. It must be as ridiculous a life extending substance as mercury. Or chimp testicles. Or whatever they ground into Spermine. Yet its proponent, a guy called Élie Metchnikoff, won the 1908 Nobel price in Medicine for the discovery of the immune system. And boasting immunity by eliminating the redundant phagocytes that cause damage in old age is exactly what Metchnikoff was doing by turning the juices of moth larvae — alongside the nectar of flies and the sap of dung beetles — into a vaccine.
Naively underestimating their unscrupulousness, Metchnikoff discussed his findings with the press, who of course accidentally-on-purpose misinterpreted the whole conversation. Even more worryingly, they assured their readers that no one should “despair to see the year 2000” (it was 1899).
Metchnikoff didn’t believe that rejuvenation was anywhere in sight, but since history loves irony, the one who loathed making promises turned out to be the one whose theories placed Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth within tantalizing reach.
Currently, the fastest runners in the race against death seek to exploit the immune system’s capacity for self-healing, which is exactly what the Russian proposed over 100 years ago. The icky factor also survived, with intestinal fecal transplants being one such technique. Yuck.
