It’s convincing to see how consistent all the castration data is, so I was quite surprised when the other day I happened to start reading A History of Life-Extensionism which was just posted online and I learned that one of the reasons for the early medical interest in sex hormones and hormonal treatment for health & life extension was because eunuchs were seen as short-lived, feeble, and stupid and since this was due to a lack of sex hormones, perhaps aging itself is due to a lack (emphasis added):
Brown-Séquard was a foremost authority in endocrinology, having proven specific effects of internal secretions, particularly those of the sex glands. In the widely publicized presentation to the French Biological Society of June 1, 1889, entitled the “Effects in man of subcutaneous injections of freshly prepared liquid from guinea pig and dog testes,”[xciv] [paper] Brown-Séquard announced his first attempts at hormone replacement therapy for rejuvenation, introducing longevity and rejuvenation research as an integral part of scientific discourse, and in fact establishing the field of therapeutic endocrinology.
In that seminal address of 1889,[xcv] Brown-Séquard proceeded from the observation that “true eunuchs are remarkable in their feebleness and their deficit in physical and intellectual activity” and the conviction that “analogous defects are observed in men who abuse coitus or masturbate” to the assumption that “these along with numerous other facts, clearly show that the testicles furnish to the blood, … principles which give energy to the nervous system and probably also to the muscles.” It followed that the supplementation of these deficits by animal sex gland extracts can retard senility. Their almost miraculous reinvigorating effects on his own person were described by Brown-Séquard, ending with a call for further research. (For Brown-Séquard the reinvigoration was not lasting, he died 5 years later, at the age of 77.)
...Perhaps the most ardent follower of Brown-Séquard was Serge (Samuel) Abramovich Voronoff. Born in 1866 near Voronezh, Russia, a son of a wealthy Jewish manufacturer, he immigrated to Paris in 1884 at the age of 18 and became a naturalized French citizen in 1895. (The drive and ability to adapt in the new country must have been strong, as Voronoff was often said to have become “more French than the French.”[cv]) In Rejuvenation by Grafting (1925),[cvi] Voronoff related the history of his method. While serving as a personal physician of the Egyptian viceroy Abbas II, in 1898 he observed the enfeeblement of eunuchs, which led him to believe in the invigorating and rejuvenating power of the sex glands. In 1913, he began experimenting with tissue grafting
(Stambler mentions in the footnotes Hamilton & Mestler’s paper as a counterexample, but not the others.)
This makes me wonder how they could have been so wrong, if all subsequent data indicated long life for eunuchs. I tried to look up Voronoff’s Rejuvenation by Grafting & How to restore youth and live longer but they are unavailable online despite existing in Google Books (gee, thanks copyright laws); googling snippets and in other books, quotes indicate he attended the deathbeds of a number of youngish Egyptian eunuchs and far from knowing any centenarian eunuchs much less several like the Koreans, says “I have never known an eunuch to exceed the age of sixty.”, describing them as (quoted in Bourke’s What it Means to be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present)
Voronoff encouraged physiologists to scrutinize the bodies of male eunuchs who could not be classed as ‘truly men’. In a visit to Cairo in 1898, Voronoff was ‘immensely struck’ by the appearance of these eunuchs. They were
long in the leg, with small craniums and smooth, hairless faces. In the majority of instances they are obese, with pendulous cheeks, developed breasts, and enlarged pelves. They look, in fact, like old women, and the resemblance is enhanced by their characteristic high-pitched voices. The muscles are flabby, the walk and movements lethargic, the gums and sclerotics [white of the eye] pallid. They present, in short, all the signs so characteristic of the anaemic, feeble, and flabby organism.
Further evidence for their lack of manly characteristics included their ‘slow’ intelligence and lack of ‘courage and enterprise’.
A Brief History of Bad Medicine implies that these were true eunuchs in the sense that they never experienced puberty and so should have had the maximal benefit:
...had the opportunity to examine some eunuchs—men who had been deliberately castrated at the age of six or seven...Fascinated, Voronoff took the opportunity to examine a large number of eunuchs and affirmed that these characteristics were common to them all. Quite reasonably, he concluded that all these effects were connected with the absence of the testicles...
I have no particular reason to disbelieve Voronoff, and it sounds very much like there was no apparent longevity benefit. So I wonder what the reason for the discrepancy between the modern data and the Asian & Ottoman data, and the Egyptian eunuchs? The main proposed mechanism, better immune system functioning, sounds as if it should give much larger benefits in Egypt than elsewhere, since as part of Africa there are so many infectious diseases there like malaria.
Flabby muscles, lack of courage, etc. are entirely consistent with low (or absent) testosterone. After all, testosterone is the reason why men compete in sports separately from women and are, generally speaking, more aggressive than women.
However general flabbiness does not imply a short life. I wonder if there were social or cultural reasons why Egyptian eunuchs didn’t live long.
Hmm. It seems possible that eunuchs could display certain “enfeebled” traits despite living longer. Some of the traits Vornoff described are mentioned by Hamilton and Mestler and the authors of the study on Ottoman and Asian eunuchs. One paper—I don’t remember which, but I can try to find it again if you’re interested—suggested that castrated animals lived longer because of general inantion. I am still curious about the extent to which castration at age 6 or 7 would have different effects on health and lifespan than castration around age 11, though I weakly suspect that 11 is the optimal age to do it at for life expectancy maximization purposes.
It seems possible that eunuchs could display certain “enfeebled” traits despite living longer.
Sure. In fact, they pretty much have to for the original story to make sense: the description of being pudgier, weaker, and more woman-like is common to all descriptions of eunuchs, East or West, including the long-lived ones. No one describes the Korean eunuchs (and future centenarians) as sporting enormous thick beards and holding strongman contests. So if you believe the long-life claims, then you must also believe that the enfeeblement can go along with longer-life.
I quoted those bits mostly to establish that yes, they definitely were physically eunuchs and they weren’t simply fakes who bought ‘eunuch status’ (as I’ve read a lot of the Chinese court eunuchs were doing towards the end as the system broke down), that they otherwise looked exactly like the long-lived eunuchs elsewhere, and it’s not as simple as they were castrated post-puberty because they were before—but Voronoff is emphatic about them not having any apparent longevity benefit to the point where he based his entire anti-aging paradigm on the belief that they have negative longevity.
Why this is, I don’t know. The most obvious differentiator between Egypt and the other countries, infectious disease burden, would predict the opposite of what Voronoff claims. So it would seem to be important to find out whether Voronoff was right about the Egyptian eunuchs and if he is, what could possibly be making such an enormous difference in outcomes, since this factor could potentially negate any gains in the modern environment as well and give clues as to what the mechanism is (evidence against the immune hypothesis, evidence for… what?).
I also don’t think I’ve seen Egyptian eunuchs ever come up before in the previous papers or discussions I read about castration and life expectancy, so further research on this could be useful. (Unfortunately, Egypt is in a lot of turmoil now and you’d probably need to read Egyptian Arabic or French if you wanted to do original research on the ground; it’s too much to hope for that there might be big registries of Egyptian eunuchs in English with data on lifespans.)
In any case, thanks for mentioning the case of Egyptian eunuchs. It’s plausible that Lumifer’s suggestion, that social or cultural causes may be behind the shorter lifespans of Egyptian eunuchs, accounts for this effect, but I obviously can’t say either way, not having looked into the matter of Egyptian eunuchs myself.
It is worth mentioning that Hamilton and Mestler didn’t think that African American eunuchs gained as many years of life from castration as white eunuchs did. I basically ignored the data on African American eunuchs from Hamilton and Mestler in the above post. In fact, I don’t have much of an intuition regarding how race might affect the number of years of life gained from health/medical interventions at all.
It is worth mentioning that Hamilton and Mestler didn’t think that African American eunuchs gained as many years of life from castration as white eunuchs did. I basically ignored the data on African American eunuchs from Hamilton and Mestler in the above post.
Oh, I thought you covered all the eunuchs… If you left out poorer-performing eunuch groups, that tends to undermine the case. Unless one wanted to argue that Africans didn’t benefit and so through all the African admixture, Egyptian ones might not benefit either. That would be somewhat plausible. There are consistent differences in lifespan between races, after all.
One more thing is that evidently castration had a low survival rate. That makes long life conditional not only on having been castrated, but on on having been castrated and surviving it.
If there were such a mortality bias where the procedure kills the weaker, then unless native Egyptian surgical skills in the late 1800s are much better than Chinese surgical skills, I would again expect that to produce excess longevity in Egyptian eunuchs and not the Chinese/Korean eunuchs (which is the opposite of what we seem to observe).
That was a general point about eunuch longevity studies, not specifically about the Egyptian ones. I expect the techniques in Egypt and China to have beeen similar.
I expect that the survival rate should be incredibly close to 100%, if one goes to a surgeon rather than cutting himself. The number of years of life one should expect to lose from dying during an orchiectomy times the probability of death occurring then is going to be hundreds of times less then the expected number of years even a 30-year old would gain from castration.
The survival rate is close to 100% now. However the data that you rely on comes from previous centuries when the survival rate was low. Thus your data set has a literal survival bias.
It’s convincing to see how consistent all the castration data is, so I was quite surprised when the other day I happened to start reading A History of Life-Extensionism which was just posted online and I learned that one of the reasons for the early medical interest in sex hormones and hormonal treatment for health & life extension was because eunuchs were seen as short-lived, feeble, and stupid and since this was due to a lack of sex hormones, perhaps aging itself is due to a lack (emphasis added):
(Stambler mentions in the footnotes Hamilton & Mestler’s paper as a counterexample, but not the others.)
This makes me wonder how they could have been so wrong, if all subsequent data indicated long life for eunuchs. I tried to look up Voronoff’s Rejuvenation by Grafting & How to restore youth and live longer but they are unavailable online despite existing in Google Books (gee, thanks copyright laws); googling snippets and in other books, quotes indicate he attended the deathbeds of a number of youngish Egyptian eunuchs and far from knowing any centenarian eunuchs much less several like the Koreans, says “I have never known an eunuch to exceed the age of sixty.”, describing them as (quoted in Bourke’s What it Means to be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present)
A Brief History of Bad Medicine implies that these were true eunuchs in the sense that they never experienced puberty and so should have had the maximal benefit:
I have no particular reason to disbelieve Voronoff, and it sounds very much like there was no apparent longevity benefit. So I wonder what the reason for the discrepancy between the modern data and the Asian & Ottoman data, and the Egyptian eunuchs? The main proposed mechanism, better immune system functioning, sounds as if it should give much larger benefits in Egypt than elsewhere, since as part of Africa there are so many infectious diseases there like malaria.
Flabby muscles, lack of courage, etc. are entirely consistent with low (or absent) testosterone. After all, testosterone is the reason why men compete in sports separately from women and are, generally speaking, more aggressive than women.
However general flabbiness does not imply a short life. I wonder if there were social or cultural reasons why Egyptian eunuchs didn’t live long.
Hmm. It seems possible that eunuchs could display certain “enfeebled” traits despite living longer. Some of the traits Vornoff described are mentioned by Hamilton and Mestler and the authors of the study on Ottoman and Asian eunuchs. One paper—I don’t remember which, but I can try to find it again if you’re interested—suggested that castrated animals lived longer because of general inantion. I am still curious about the extent to which castration at age 6 or 7 would have different effects on health and lifespan than castration around age 11, though I weakly suspect that 11 is the optimal age to do it at for life expectancy maximization purposes.
Sure. In fact, they pretty much have to for the original story to make sense: the description of being pudgier, weaker, and more woman-like is common to all descriptions of eunuchs, East or West, including the long-lived ones. No one describes the Korean eunuchs (and future centenarians) as sporting enormous thick beards and holding strongman contests. So if you believe the long-life claims, then you must also believe that the enfeeblement can go along with longer-life.
I quoted those bits mostly to establish that yes, they definitely were physically eunuchs and they weren’t simply fakes who bought ‘eunuch status’ (as I’ve read a lot of the Chinese court eunuchs were doing towards the end as the system broke down), that they otherwise looked exactly like the long-lived eunuchs elsewhere, and it’s not as simple as they were castrated post-puberty because they were before—but Voronoff is emphatic about them not having any apparent longevity benefit to the point where he based his entire anti-aging paradigm on the belief that they have negative longevity.
Why this is, I don’t know. The most obvious differentiator between Egypt and the other countries, infectious disease burden, would predict the opposite of what Voronoff claims. So it would seem to be important to find out whether Voronoff was right about the Egyptian eunuchs and if he is, what could possibly be making such an enormous difference in outcomes, since this factor could potentially negate any gains in the modern environment as well and give clues as to what the mechanism is (evidence against the immune hypothesis, evidence for… what?).
I also don’t think I’ve seen Egyptian eunuchs ever come up before in the previous papers or discussions I read about castration and life expectancy, so further research on this could be useful. (Unfortunately, Egypt is in a lot of turmoil now and you’d probably need to read Egyptian Arabic or French if you wanted to do original research on the ground; it’s too much to hope for that there might be big registries of Egyptian eunuchs in English with data on lifespans.)
In any case, thanks for mentioning the case of Egyptian eunuchs. It’s plausible that Lumifer’s suggestion, that social or cultural causes may be behind the shorter lifespans of Egyptian eunuchs, accounts for this effect, but I obviously can’t say either way, not having looked into the matter of Egyptian eunuchs myself.
It is worth mentioning that Hamilton and Mestler didn’t think that African American eunuchs gained as many years of life from castration as white eunuchs did. I basically ignored the data on African American eunuchs from Hamilton and Mestler in the above post. In fact, I don’t have much of an intuition regarding how race might affect the number of years of life gained from health/medical interventions at all.
Oh, I thought you covered all the eunuchs… If you left out poorer-performing eunuch groups, that tends to undermine the case. Unless one wanted to argue that Africans didn’t benefit and so through all the African admixture, Egyptian ones might not benefit either. That would be somewhat plausible. There are consistent differences in lifespan between races, after all.
One more thing is that evidently castration had a low survival rate. That makes long life conditional not only on having been castrated, but on on having been castrated and surviving it.
If there were such a mortality bias where the procedure kills the weaker, then unless native Egyptian surgical skills in the late 1800s are much better than Chinese surgical skills, I would again expect that to produce excess longevity in Egyptian eunuchs and not the Chinese/Korean eunuchs (which is the opposite of what we seem to observe).
That was a general point about eunuch longevity studies, not specifically about the Egyptian ones. I expect the techniques in Egypt and China to have beeen similar.
I expect that the survival rate should be incredibly close to 100%, if one goes to a surgeon rather than cutting himself. The number of years of life one should expect to lose from dying during an orchiectomy times the probability of death occurring then is going to be hundreds of times less then the expected number of years even a 30-year old would gain from castration.
The survival rate is close to 100% now. However the data that you rely on comes from previous centuries when the survival rate was low. Thus your data set has a literal survival bias.