Medicine: Manufactured Masculinity

Primitive people from time immemorial have eaten the hearts, livers and testicles of ferocious beasts and valorous enemies. Believers in sympathetic magic, they sought thus to acquire strength and bravery. Scientific minds saw no sense to this until about 75 years ago Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard (1817-94) concluded that such a diet somehow made men of weaklings. He sought the reason and found a testicular secretion which in infinitesimal amounts did what the whole gland could do. That potent quintessence came to be called a hormone. Other glands in the body were soon found...

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