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  • The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–1950
  • Lisa Forman Cody (bio)
The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–1950, by Chandak Sengoopta; pp. vi + 354. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, $45.00, £28.50.

Testicular extract was, according to 1930s journalist Paul de Kruif, "'the most secret quintessence of life'" (174). Chandak Sengoopta explores the rapturous enthusiasm expressed by laypeople, scientists, and doctors for endocrinology within the context of ever-changing research into the seemingly magical power of hormones between 1850 and 1950. This specialized monograph in the history of biology, medicine, and the epistemology of science will undoubtedly attract and impress an expert readership in these areas. An audience more grounded in other fields including gender studies and queer theory, however, should not be put off by the technical scientific detail of the study. Sengoopta's work will force readers to reconsider what laboratory scientists, medical practitioners, and cultural commentators made of sex, gender, reproduction, aging, and health in the past. Although most of the book focuses on post-Victorian research, his volume will be useful to and may surprise Victorianists.

For scholars unfamiliar with endocrinology, Sengoopta briefly divides the dominant medical theories of how the body regulated itself into three chronological periods: for centuries until the 1600s, both medical practitioners and laypeople subscribed to a Galenic model of physiological regulation in which a proper balance of humors between the hot and the cold, the dry and the wet was sought. Beginning in the seventeenth century, medical men argued that the nervous system "carried messages, connected different viscera, and modulated their functions" (11). During the nineteenth century, this "solidist and neural" (3) model dominated medical understanding of the body, but by the 1850s, researchers sharpened their focus on the gonads and practitioners began performing "therapeutic" interventions on the ovaries and testicles, including oophorectomies and castrations. While knowledge of and interest in the glands grew in the nineteenth century, most researchers still maintained that the nervous system governed the gonads. By the 1910s, however, scientific opinion shifted to assert instead that the gonads and other glands governed the body biochemically; by the 1920s, the medical profession and the public both believed that endocrine knowledge and therapy could lead to cures for sexual dysfunction, homosexuality, melancholy, aging, and more. Many Victorianists will recognize the humoral and nervous models of physiology, but will find Sengoopta's exploration of the hormonal model to challenge some assumptions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific medicine.

Endocrinology encompasses all of the body's glands, but because doctors, researchers, and the public took special interest in the gonads, Sengoopta's story pays special attention to sex, reproduction, and gender. Thomas Laqueur's influential argument [End Page 685] in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990) proposed that early modern sex and gender were on a continuum with some fluidity between the masculine and the feminine. But according to Laqueur, by the nineteenth century, the sexes—and normative notions of gender—had become polarized. For many scholars, the story ends there with the Victorians, their separate spheres, and their wholehearted commitment to the fundamental opposition of male and female bodies and minds. Sengoopta does not entirely shed this chronology, but, through a series of fascinating case studies, reveals how frequently nineteenth- and twentieth-century researchers derived results that potentially contradicted cultural-medical models of fundamental sexual difference. Despite the promise of endocrinology to offer a more nuanced view of human experiences, including sexuality and aging, most researchers and commentators doggedly clung to the status quo, according to Sengoopta. Knowledge about glands seemed to offer hope that the right hormonal therapy could "cure" homosexuality, effeminacy, masculine women, decrepitude, and more, which "was the reason why the new chemical understanding of gender turned out to be less destabilizing than conservative. The theory was radical and the practices revolutionary, but they were based on norms of gender that were entirely traditional" (115).

Whereas a positivist historian of science or medicine might remind the reader along the way how far from the "truth"—and perhaps bizarre—many hormonal experiments and interpretations were in...

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