Dr. Serge: The Man That Made Millions in the 1920's Transplanting Monkey Testicle Tissue into the Ballsacks of Millionaires
Updated: Sep 2
In June 1920, a surgeon in Paris sliced thin strips of testicle tissue from a chimpanzee and stitched them into the scrotum of an ageing patient. Three years later, more than 700 doctors stood up at an international surgical congress in London and applauded him for it. That surgeon was Serge Voronoff, and for the next decade he was one of the richest, most famous and most mocked men in Europe, a doctor who convinced millionaires, opera singers and industrial magnates that a monkey's glands could buy them another twenty years of life.
None of it worked. But the story of how a Russian-born surgeon built a fortune, a private monkey farm and a genuine cultural phenomenon on a theory that modern immunology would later prove impossible is stranger, and better documented, than most people realise.
Quick Answers
Who was Serge Voronoff? A Russian-born French surgeon (1866 to 1951) who claimed grafting monkey gland tissue onto human testicles could reverse ageing.
Did the monkey gland transplant actually work? No. The grafts were rejected by the immune system and produced no lasting hormonal effect, something confirmed once transplant immunology developed in the 1940s.
Where did the idea come from? From Voronoff's decade as court surgeon in Cairo, where he linked the premature ageing of palace eunuchs to the loss of their glands.
How did Voronoff die? He died in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 1951 after a fall, largely forgotten by a medical establishment that had once celebrated him.
A Death in a Cairo Harem
Voronoff was born Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff around July 1866 in the Russian village of Shekhman, one of several children of a distiller. He left for France at 18 to study medicine and became a naturalised Frenchman in 1895. His real education in surgery came from Alexis Carrel, the French surgeon who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for pioneering the technique of suturing blood vessels together, a skill Voronoff would later put to very unusual use.
From 1900 to 1910, Voronoff served as court surgeon to Khedive Abbas II of Egypt, founding a hospital at his own expense in Choubrah and eventually being awarded the Legion of Honour for his service. It was in Cairo, watching the palace's sixty eunuchs age far faster than other men, that Voronoff had the idea that would define his career.
“One of the eunuchs who died at 45 looked like a man of 90,” he told a reporter years later, convinced that the removal of the testicular glands, not just their reproductive function, had drained the men of their vitality decades early.
It's worth noting the man Voronoff learned surgery from. Alexis Carrel later became notorious for his own eugenicist writings, which makes it a grim irony that his star pupil went on to build a career explicitly promising the rich a longer, more vigorous life.
A Rich Widow's Money and Five Hundred Sheep
Voronoff couldn't test his theory on eunuchs alone. In 1917 he found a patron in Evelyn Bostwick, a wealthy American socialite and daughter of Standard Oil co-founder Jabez Bostwick. Her money funded years of animal trials before a single human was ever touched: between 1917 and 1926, Voronoff carried out more than five hundred testicular graft operations on sheep, goats and bulls, transplanting glands from younger animals into older ones and reporting that the old animals regained their vigour.
Bostwick did more than write cheques. She worked as Voronoff's laboratory assistant at the Collège de France, reportedly becoming the first woman ever admitted to that institution in the process. The two married in 1920, the same year Voronoff finally moved his experiments from livestock to people.
The First Human Graft
Voronoff's first official monkey gland transplant onto a human took place on 12 June 1920. Thin slices of testicle tissue from chimpanzees and baboons were sewn into a patient's scrotum, thin enough, Voronoff believed, that the foreign tissue could fuse with the surrounding human tissue rather than simply sit there. He claimed the procedure restored vitality, sharpened memory and, in some cases, even reduced a patient's need for glasses.
By 1923, his work was being celebrated rather than questioned. At the International Congress of Surgeons in London that year, more than 700 attendees applauded what they took to be a genuine breakthrough in the science of ageing. Demand outstripped anything Voronoff could supply from executed criminals, which had been his original source of human testicular tissue, so he turned to primates instead.
Building a Monkey Farm Fit for a Castle
To keep pace with demand, Voronoff opened his own monkey farm near Ventimiglia on the Italian Riviera, staffed by a former circus animal keeper. In 1925 he went a step further and bought the Grimaldi Castle, a villa with sea views near Menton, which he used to house the operation and where he would live for the next fourteen years. The place became something of a tourist attraction for the curious rich; the French-American opera star Lily Pons was a reported regular visitor, and a 1940 Time magazine piece even noted she'd once been kissed by one of the resident apes.
Millionaires, Ovaries and a Very Strange Novel
Voronoff's clientele read like a society register. Harold McCormick, chairman of the International Harvester Company, was among the noted patients, and by the early 1930s more than 500 men had undergone the procedure in France alone, with thousands more treated worldwide, including at a dedicated clinic in Algiers. Even Voronoff's own younger brother Georges went under the knife, a detail that says something about how genuinely Voronoff believed his own theory.
He didn't stop with men. Voronoff began transplanting monkey ovaries into women seeking the same rejuvenating effect, then tried the experiment in reverse, grafting a human ovary into a female monkey and attempting to inseminate her with human sperm. Nothing came of it, but the sheer strangeness of the attempt inspired the French writer Felicien Champsaur to write Nora, the Monkey Turned Woman, a novel imagining a hybrid creature born of exactly that kind of experiment.
The Wealth and the Whispers
Success made Voronoff extraordinarily rich and extraordinarily talked about. He occupied an entire floor of a luxury Parisian hotel, kept a retinue of chauffeurs, valets and secretaries, and became a fixture in the gossip pages as much as the medical ones. Max Thorek, the Chicago surgeon after whom a Chicago hospital is still named, recalled that talk of monkey glands had reached both “fashionable dinner parties and cracker barrel confabs”, the elite and the ordinary swapping the same rumour in very different rooms.
For all the showmanship, Voronoff insisted he wasn't running a circus act. In 1927 he said he didn't want to be “Barnumized”, a reference to the American showman P.T. Barnum. It's a strange line to look back on given that Voronoff himself never underwent the procedure, despite decades of promising he'd have it done the moment he felt he needed it.
The poet E.E. Cummings referenced Voronoff's work in a poem about a famous doctor who grafted monkey glands into millionaires, and a 1929 Marx Brothers musical, The Cocoanuts, included a song joking that any man too old to dance should simply go and get himself a monkey gland. Cocktail history has its own footnote too, though the popular version of the story gets the venue wrong. The Monkey Gland cocktail, a mix of gin, orange juice, grenadine and a dash of absinthe, wasn't invented at the Ritz. It was created by the Scottish bartender Harry MacElhone at his own Harry's New York Bar in Paris and first published in his 1922 cocktail book, credited explicitly as a nod to Voronoff's rejuvenation work.
An Unlikely Fan Base: British Football
The strangest, and best documented, offshoot of the whole craze had nothing to do with Voronoff directly. In the summer of 1937, Wolverhampton Wanderers manager Frank Buckley arranged for his entire squad to undergo a course of twelve gland injections from a chemist named Menzies Sharp, having reportedly tried the treatment on himself first. Wolves' form improved dramatically, and after they beat Leicester City 10 to 1 in April 1938, Leicester's directors complained to their local MP, who demanded a government inquiry into the treatment. The Minister of Health declined to investigate, and one Labour MP suggested, apparently only half joking, that government ministers could do with a course of the injections themselves. The Football League eventually ruled that clubs could keep using gland treatments, but only if players volunteered for them.
Serge Voronoff performing testicular extraction on an ape for subsequent implantation in a human.
Why It Was Never Going to Work
Voronoff's central assumption, that grafted animal tissue could simply merge with a human body if the slices were thin enough, wasn't just wrong. It was, by the standards of what science would soon discover, close to the opposite of how the immune system behaves. During the Second World War, the biologist Peter Medawar was asked to study why skin grafts on burns patients kept failing, and his research through the 1940s established that graft rejection is an immune response: the body identifies foreign tissue and destroys it, and does so faster on a second exposure. Xenografts between species fare even worse than grafts between two humans.
In other words, the primate tissue Voronoff was implanting was never fusing with anything. It was almost certainly being broken down and absorbed by his patients' immune systems within weeks, well before any of the reported benefits would have had time to set in. Whatever improvements his patients felt were most plausibly the placebo effect operating on rich, anxious men who had just paid a surgeon a small fortune and been told they would feel younger.
The Fall
By the late 1930s, other surgeons had begun trying to replicate Voronoff's results and consistently failed. His own patients were part of the problem: the benefits he'd promised tended to fade after three to five years, which Voronoff explained away as the graft dying off rather than as evidence it had never worked. Instead of reconsidering, he escalated, arguing by 1930 that matching the blood of monkey and patient more precisely could make a single graft last a lifetime, and speculating that a human could theoretically live to 140. The British surgeon Kenneth Walker dismissed the whole enterprise as “no better than the methods of witches and magicians”. The 1940s brought the first real hormone research, and injections of actual testosterone produced none of the dramatic rejuvenation Voronoff had spent two decades promising. Public mockery followed fast. Novelty ashtrays appeared in Parisian homes showing monkeys shielding their genitals, printed with a phrase translated from French: “No, Voronoff, you won't get me!” By the end of the decade his clinics had closed and his name had become a punchline rather than a promise.
A typed receipt for payment on Collège de France stationery, compensating him for his work as the director of a laboratory. Voronoff’s salary is 20,000 francs a year, with 5,000 francs disbursed each trimester before deductions. His handwritten note in the lower left corner acknowledges receipt of 4561 francs.
A Dog Called Sharik
Voronoff's strangest legacy might be literary. Mikhail Bulgakov's 1925 satirical novella Heart of a Dog features Professor Preobrazhensky, a wealthy Moscow surgeon who transplants human glands into a stray dog with disastrous results. Literary scholars have long pointed to Voronoff's very public experiments as the likely inspiration, given that Bulgakov was writing at exactly the moment monkey gland surgery was making international headlines.
Death and a Legacy Nobody Expected
Voronoff died in Lausanne, Switzerland on 3 September 1951, aged 85, after suffering a fall. Few newspapers marked his passing, and those that did tended to treat him as a punchline rather than a pioneer. He was buried at Cimetière Caucade in Nice, the city where he'd spent his most famous years running the monkey farm nearby.
His scientific reputation has had a strange afterlife. In the 1990s, some researchers speculated that Voronoff's primate experiments might have been an early route by which a simian virus crossed into the human population and eventually gave rise to HIV. That theory has since been largely debunked by virologists, who've traced HIV's origins to bushmeat hunting rather than to Voronoff's clinics.
More soberly, some historians now credit his early, if badly mistaken, work on endocrinology and glandular function with helping nudge the field toward the hormone research that eventually produced real treatments. The cocktail named after him is still on menus in Paris today, which is more than can be said for most of his medical claims.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did anyone actually benefit from Voronoff's surgery?
There's no reliable evidence that any patient experienced lasting physical benefit. Reported improvements are now attributed to the placebo effect rather than any biological mechanism.
Was Voronoff a fraud?
Most historians treat him as sincerely mistaken rather than a deliberate con artist. He underwent related procedures himself and enrolled his own brother, which suggests genuine, if misplaced, belief in his own theory.
Is xenotransplantation still studied today?
Yes, though on entirely different scientific footing. Modern xenotransplant research uses genetically modified pig organs and heavy immunosuppression, addressing precisely the rejection problem that doomed Voronoff's work a century earlier.
You Might Also Like
Sources
4. The True Story of Dr. Voronoff's Plan to Use Monkey Testicles to Make Us Immortal (Atlas Obscura)
10. Historical Tidbit: Serge Voronoff and Monkey Testis Transplantation (Pediatric Endocrine Society)
