Somatosphere: Medical Anthropology, Vasectomania and a Vaccine Against Fatigue

Just to add to the mix if you haven’t seen it in the miniblog – h/t to Dr Vaughan Bell for the medical anthropology blog Somatosphere. As Bell says, Somatosphere brings together:

the study of how culture influences our understanding of health, illness and medicine.

While we tend to think of illnesses as specific encapsualted ‘things’ that happen to the body, it turns out that our culture and psychology has a huge influence on not just what we think of illness, but how we actually become ill.

Culture also shapes what we think of as ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ and this is one of the main driving forces behind how we express physical or psychological distress and expect it to be treated.

Somatosphere has an intriguing article on Ritalin – your grandmother’s helper. And through their good offices I have now read about cures for fatigue with a particular emphasis on that of the beleagured male: Vasectomania, and Other Cures for Sloth.

In 1904, the Heidelberg chemist Wilhelm Weichardt made a sensational announcement. He promised a utopia in which men would never grow weary, but would be transformed into industrious and tireless machines. Weichardt thought that fatigue was caused by the accumulation of toxins in the blood, and he harvested a concentrated version of this poison from rats that he drove to death by strenuous exercise. As the toxins built up, he observed, the rats descended into a kind of “narcosis” or “stupor,” before slowing to a “complete standstill.” In his laboratory, Weichardt worked on an antibody. He called the resulting miracle drug ”his vaccine against fatigue” antikenotoxin…

In the decade following its invention, antikenotoxin vapors were pumped into Berlin’s classrooms in the optimistic hope that science could save schoolchildren from infection by the dangerous seeds of sloth. The experiment was thought to have incredible beneficial effects. Students who had been secretly exposed to the gas for five hours were given a series of mathematical tests that they apparently performed with “considerable improvement”; their speed of calculation increased by fifty percent, and their answers showed improved accuracy. Pupils who were usually sleepy and bored by the time of their afternoon lessons were now uncharacteristically sprightly…

The physiologist Serge Voronoff, a Russian working in Paris, was one of the most infamous of the gland doctors. He thought that the lazy, mentally disabled, run-down, and aged could be revitalized by testicular transplants. Many wealthy men underwent the costly surgery; Voronoff transplanted the testes of executed criminals into millionaires. Legal contracts were drawn up with prospective donors, but apparently willing individuals were in such short supply that what one scientist called a “despicable trade in organs” began to develop. According to one newspaper, men were even being mugged for their testicles, “knocked unconscious and then robbed of the long-sought-for organs.”

Go. Read. It’s fascinating.