Paris in the Roaring Twenties was the setting for one of the 20th century's most bizarre medical frauds: the claim that humans could be rejuvenated by being transplanted with the organs of apes, in particular their testicles.
Dominating this pseudoscience and deriving a fortune from its exploitation was one man - Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff. He insisted the testicles of a primate could turn a seventy-year-old into a stud overnight. Women too could find new energy in transplanted ovaries.
Thousands of people paid a fortune for treatment by Voronoff. He traveled the world in a Rolls Royce, performing surgery on politicians, industrialists, kings.
Numerous novels and movies, including KING KONG, can be traced to Voronoff's theories, but even Hollywood would have shunned his most outlandish experiment; inserting human ovaries and uterus into a chimpanzee, anticipating a child that shared the characteristics of ape and man. One author suggested he had already succeeded - and the result was none other than part-African American dancer Josephine Baker!
Award-winning writer on Paris John Baxter (THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WORLD) turns a searchlight onto this grotesque corner of medical history and its most sinister practitioner, a man for whom the term “mad doctor” might have been coined.
John Baxter is a renowned novelist, lecturer and broadcaster as well as a highly acclaimed film critic and film biographer. His subjects have included Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick and Von Sternberg.
He has also had a lifelong passion for book collecting, which led him to write a best-selling memoir of his life as a collector, A Pound of Paper, in which he also explores the exploding market in first editions. In his enchanting memoir, The Most Beautiful Walk in the World (May 2011), John remembers his year-long experience of giving “literary walking tours” through his beloved Paris, where he has lived since 1989.
John's latest book, Paris at the End of the World: The City of Light During the Great War 1914-1918, brilliantly brings to life one of the most dramatic and fascinating periods in the city's history.
Dominating this pseudoscience and deriving a fortune from its exploitation was one man - Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff. He insisted the testicles of a primate could turn a seventy-year-old into a stud overnight. Women too could find new energy in transplanted ovaries.
Thousands of people paid a fortune for treatment by Voronoff. He traveled the world in a Rolls Royce, performing surgery on politicians, industrialists, kings.
Numerous novels and movies, including KING KONG, can be traced to Voronoff's theories, but even Hollywood would have shunned his most outlandish experiment; inserting human ovaries and uterus into a chimpanzee, anticipating a child that shared the characteristics of ape and man. One author suggested he had already succeeded - and the result was none other than part-African American dancer Josephine Baker!
Award-winning writer on Paris John Baxter (THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WORLD) turns a searchlight onto this grotesque corner of medical history and its most sinister practitioner, a man for whom the term “mad doctor” might have been coined.
John Baxter is a renowned novelist, lecturer and broadcaster as well as a highly acclaimed film critic and film biographer. His subjects have included Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick and Von Sternberg.
He has also had a lifelong passion for book collecting, which led him to write a best-selling memoir of his life as a collector, A Pound of Paper, in which he also explores the exploding market in first editions. In his enchanting memoir, The Most Beautiful Walk in the World (May 2011), John remembers his year-long experience of giving “literary walking tours” through his beloved Paris, where he has lived since 1989.
John's latest book, Paris at the End of the World: The City of Light During the Great War 1914-1918, brilliantly brings to life one of the most dramatic and fascinating periods in the city's history.
Used availability for John Baxter's The King Kong Syndrome