W B Yeats and the Steinach operation: N Rushton

W B Y E AT S AND THE STEINACH OPERATION

Eugen Steinach believed that although gender was genetically determined sexual potency could be modified by manipulating the sex glands. This led to his concept that homosexuality in men was owing to the faulty development of the testicles leading to the over-secretion of feminising hormones. His treatment was to excise one of the patient’s testicles and replace it with a donor testicle from a convincingly heterosexual male. It was not successful for either patient.

Steinach was not a quack. He became the Director of the Institute of Experimental Biology in Vienna in 1921 and was at the forefront of what we now know as endocrine research. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize on a number of occasions but was not awarded one.

He was aware of the relative asexuality of infants and of the elderly which he attributed to the under-activity of sex glands. He was an animal experimentalist; most of his operations were carried out on rats or guinea-pigs. He noticed that if prepubertal rats were castrated they became sexually underdeveloped in adult life. If these rats had a testicular transplant their sexual behaviour became more normal. This raised the possibility that the elderly could be revitalised by manipulation of their gonads.

Vasectomy was known to destroy the sperm producing cells of the testicle from which Steinach reasoned that the procedure could lead to an increased production of the cells that produced male hormone. He vasectomised elderly rats and reported that they were indeed given a new lease of life. Following this logic the Steinach vasoligature operation was born in 1918. It was (usually) a unilateral vasectomy.

Human experiments were carried out on a number of patients, sometimes without their consent or knowledge during the course of another operative procedure. The justification for this barely ethical action was to eliminate the placebo effect. The first operation was carried out by Karl Lichtenstern on a middleaged coachman who was, apparently, transformed. The operation became very popular mostly among the wealthy and famous. In Austria a hundred teachers and university professors had the operation. Sigmund Freud was among them; he had the operation in 1926 but was disappointed with the result although it is thought that his expectation was that it would cure his recurrent oral cancers.

Albert Wilson, however, was so impressed by the effect of the operation that he was to deliver a supportive lecture on the subject in the Albert Hall entitled ‘How I Was Made Twenty Years Younger’. Unfortunately he died the night before. Wilson was over seventy and had comorbid conditions. He had been warned that over exertion could be life-threatening – clearly it was!

In the early 1930s William Butler Yeats was failing in both his sexual drive and in his inspiration and enthusiasm for writing. He believed that without sexual desire he could not be creative. The death of Lady Gregory and sale of her house, Coole Park, unsettled him. He did not write anything creative for several months. He decided that the Steinach operation was an appropriate cure. It is not clear how he became aware of the operation but thousands had been done by then and it had been publicised in Europe and America in sensational fashion. It may be that his illustrator Sturge Moore was his informant. Yeats consulted a recently published account of the operation in Trinity College Library.

Yeats was Steinached in April 1934 when he was 69.The operation was carried out in Harley Street by the Austrian sexologist Norman Haire; who was also involved with the contraceptive initiative of Marie Stopes. Shortly after the operation Yeats became associated with a 27 year old actress and would-be poet Margot Ruddock. He mentored her in the art of poetry and rewrote plays so that she could have a speaking part when they were put on at the Abbey Theatre. It is not clear how close their relationship became but there was considerable speculation. Yeat’s post-operative enthusiasm for poetry was reinvigorated and he proclaimed to be delighted with the outcome of the operation. Margot Ruddock was mentally unstable and died young in an asylum.

In the Dublin papers Yeats was referred to as ‘the gland old man’.

N R

Memorial statue of W B Yeats in Sligo