Post #3698483

Btw, in light of the McConnell playing the Schrödinger's Turtle, it might be fun to recall a bit of collision of the then-nascent and not-yet-quite-science endocrinology and the rise of modern gerontocracy. After one of the Lenin's strokes — the second one, I think, but I'm not entirely sure about that —, there was a short swell of public demands that Soviet Russia's government should pay for the poor overworked man's "youth restoration". At this time, Bolshevik control over Russia's press was much weaker than after Stalin's concentration of power, so it's possible that the demands grew organically, as gossips do, not as a government-orchestrated campaign — or, it might have been as a fancy advertising campaign. You see, "youth restoration", or a couple of other similar euphemisms were, at the time, references to a medical procedure that some quasi-charlatans/intrepid enterprising doctors were offering — implantation of thin slices of goats' or various other animals' testicles under the patient's skin. At least one practitioner of this technique was, indeed, in Petrograd around the time, although I'd have to look his name up. This sort of works, for a short while, because it amounts to an early form of TRT. It was overhyped, but a dose of testosterone can, indeed, make old men feel better and more vital for a while. And that — excising and cutting up and transplanting random glands and seeing what happens — was where endocrinology as we now know it got its start. The fact that, according to later research, Lenin's earlier strokes were almost certainly not age-related but either due to, or possibly symptoms, of tertiary syphilis, just add an aromatic layer of extra piquancy to the story. (Neurosyphilis can sometimes have symptoms that resemble stroke without a stroke proper, and in 1920s, the diagnosis of stroke was either symptomatic or post-mortem; while medical x-ray imaging already existed, it was too low resolution to be of use for peeping into a living brain.) So, I guess, somebody might want to start a collection for implanting some goat ball slices under McConnell's decaying skin or something.