Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff was a French surgeon of Russian extraction who gained fame for his technique of grafting monkey testicle tissue on to the testicles of men for purportedly therapeutic purposes while working in France in the 1920s and 1930s.
Background
Samuil Abramovich Voronov was born in the village of Shekhman of the Tambov province (now Petrovsky district of the Tambov region), in the family of the Nikolayev soldier, the distiller Abram Veniaminovich Voronov (1831-1927) and Rachel-Esther of Lipskaya (? -1912), the natives of the Mogilev province.
Education
He graduated from the Voronezh Real School (1884). In 1885 he moved to France, where he graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Sorbonne and the Higher Medical School in Paris (1893)
Career
He worked in the clinic of Professor J.-E. Pean. Personal physician of King Abbas II of Egypt (1897-1909), one of the founders of medical service and education in Egypt. In 1909, he founded his own surgical laboratory in Nice, where he began experiments on gonadal graft transplantation. Chief physician of the Russian military hospital in Bordeaux (1914-1919). Since 1919 he worked again in the laboratory in Nice. In 1920, for the first time, gonads from a monkey were transplanted to a human. In total, about 500 such operations, which, although they had a short-term effect, caused a wide resonance in the world. In 1926 such operations were banned by the French government. In 1939 he headed the military hospital, where he was engaged in transplantation of skin and bone tissue. In 1940 he went to Portugal, then to the United States, he was engaged in teaching, reading popular science lectures. In 1946 he returned to France, engaged in oncology.
Achievements
Works
book
Old age and rejuvenation
(Moscow, Leningrad)
1927
Rejuvenation of gonads transplantation
(Leningrad)
1924
Transplanting testicles from ape to man
(Moscow)
1930
Connections
Voronov married for the first time in 1897 on Margaret Barbe, daughter of a busy dynamite industrialist Paul Barbe. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1912. His second wife was Evelyn Bostwick from New York (died March 3, 1921), daughter of the co-founder of the oil company Standard Oil J. A. Bostwick; they married in 1919, when she worked as an assistant in the laboratory of Voronov. The third wife of Voronov, Gertrude Schwartz, whom he married at the age of 70 and who was cousin Magde Lupescu (wife of Carol II), was 49 years younger than him. After his death, she became Countess de Foz.
Father:
Abram Veniaminovich Voronov
Mother:
Rachel-Esther Lipskaya
Brother:
Alexander Voronov
Brother:
George Voronov
Brother:
Jacob Voronov
Brother:
Ilya Voronov
Brother:
Benzion Voronov
Sister:
Anna Voronova
Collegue :
Dr. Dartigue
References
Monkey-Doodle-Doo
Song written by Irving Berlin for the Marx Brothers movie "Coconuts"
A Man on All Fours
In the story of Arthur Conan Doyle "A Man on All Fours" the plot is built around a professor who made himself a prick of extracts from the glands of a monkey.