The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–1950 (review)

This book explores the origins, contexts, and consequences of the humoral approach to sex gland research. It charts some of the complex ways in which sexual organs came to be viewed as secreting potent chemicals that determined “not only the narrowly sexual aspects of our existence but also our very beings and lives” (p. 2). Stressing views about the chemical maleability and “plasticization” (p. 6) of the body, Chandak Sengoopta illustrates how, under the auspices of a new hormonal science, the “sexual body” was transformed into a “therapeutically accessible entity” (p. 173).

The book is overwhelmingly a history of endocrine science and the various experiments, theories, and therapies developed from the 1900s through the 1940s. Much attention is devoted to Eugen Steinach’s broad scientific and therapeutic agenda, involving testicular transplantation to cure homosexuality, hormonal treatment of hermaphroditism, and vasectomies for premature senility. Steinach’s work and its implications are the keystone in the arch of Sengoopta’s narrative. The study is especially strong in its account of the range of medical uses to which gonadal, biochemical, and hormonal therapies were put: cures for menopause, aging, hemophilia, cancer, homosexuality, hermaphrodism, impotence, depression, and so on are all part of Sengoopta’s story. This broad therapeutic spectrum is especially valuable because it is often ignored in more narrowly focused studies on gender and sexuality.

The book is composed of five main chapters and an epilogue. First, it explores nineteenth-century views of the gonads as crucial nodes in the nervous system. It then describes the early research on internal secretions by Brown Séquard, Steinach, and others. A third chapter treats the “heroic age of the endocrine glands” (p. 69) in the 1920s, when sex glands seemed to hold the key to the chemical perfectibility of human life and offer hope of alleviating a wide array of bodily ailments. The fourth chapter then traces developments up to the late 1930s, especially the displacement of Steinach’s sex polarity by ideas of hormonal bisexuality, the end of gonadocentrism, and the construction of a “polyglandular infrastructure for the hormonal sexual body” (p. 119). In an extensive fifth chapter, Sengoopta then explores the role of hormones in the clinic and the transition of endocrine research from physiology and gynecology to biochemistry. Finally, in the epilogue, Sengoopta crafts his narrative as an historical return, aligning nineteenth-century views on nervous connections among ganglia, plexuses, and the gonads with the “infinitely more complex” (p. 213) neurohumoral body of the late twentieth century.

Sengoopta is unapologetic in describing his method as broad, synoptic, and “publication based.” He claims that demonstrating the sociocultural and therapeutic diversity of uses to which the gonads were put “compelled” (p. 7) such an approach. Throughout, he is at pains to illustrate the “mutual reinforcement of science, professional aims, cultural beliefs, and social stereotypes” (p. 54). At times this ambitious aim is achieved. But for the most part, the book doesn’t fulfill its promise. Neither the research methodology nor the book’s theoretical and narrative architecture are constructed in ways that allow adequate exploration of such mutual reinforcement. And too often Sengoopta balks at the “complex ocean of facts, interpretations, and sociocultural debates” (p. 164) that are needed to study it. For example, on several occasions he mentions pharmaceutical companies, but nowhere does he analyze their relationship to scientific research. Indeed, it’s implausible to assume that that relationship can be assessed adequately using his “publication-based” approach. Yet that relationship is crucial to any understanding of what the monograph purports to be about, namely the “intellectual, therapeutic, social, [and] cultural” (p. 7) uses to which endocrine research was put.

Future researchers will benefit from Sengoopta’s careful exposition of the scientific research literature, but they will have to look elsewhere for models which link that literature to changing cultural practices and mores.