For those of us clinging to the hope that some biomedical revolution in life-extension is going to come along any day now, it’s extremely depressing to read examples of this same optimism going back to the 1940s if not earlier.
Try 200 BC:
As he grew old, Qin Shi Huang desperately sought the fabled elixir of life which supposedly confers immortality. In his obsessive quest, he fell prey to many fraudulent elixirs.[72] He visited Zhifu Island three times in his search.[73]
In one case he sent Xu Fu, a Zhifu islander, with ships carrying hundreds of young men and women in search of the mystical Mount Penglai.[64] They sought Anqi Sheng, a thousand-year-old magician who had supposedly invited Qin Shi Huang during a chance meeting during his travels.[74] The expedition never returned, perhaps for fear of the consequences of failure. Legends claim that they reached Japan and colonized it.[72]
It is also possible that the Emperor’s book burning, which exempted alchemical works, could be seen as an attempt to focus the minds of the best scholars on the Emperor’s quest.[75] Some of those buried alive were alchemists, and this could have been a means of testing their death-defying abilities.[76]
“Man has Nature whacked”, said someone to a friend of mine not long ago. In their context the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the speaker was dying of tuberculosis. “No matter” he said, “I know I’m one of the casualties. Of course there are casualties on the winning as well as on the losing side. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it is winning.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)
Probably better for you too.
I Googled Crucial Fiction. I thought “goat gland science” was in issue two. A list of contents doesn’t show it. It may have been issue three.
Also, I Googled “goat gland science”. Yep, John Richard Brinkley.
https://www.geocities.ws/doctorbrinkleymuseum/
Maybe. His legal name at birth was John Romulus Brinkley. He later changed it to John Richard Brinkley but I can’t find a cite on whether he ever had it legally changed.
“You’re only as young as your glands”
I wonder if the monkey gland implants worked. It strikes me as an early attempt at supplementing the testosterone of older men, sometime that’s now moderately mainstream medicine.
Given the extremely poor record of xenografts without modern anti-rejection drugs, probably not.