The Biochemistry of Semen
secondary literature · 1954
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SUMMARY
Thaddeus Mann's 1954 monograph surveys the history of spermine on pp. 161-162. It records that Alexander von Poehl advocated the curative properties of spermine and held that it acted as a physiological tonic on autointoxication (Mann dates this idea to 1893), that Poehl is best known for the 1898 St. Petersburg monograph on the spermine theory, and that his pharmacological and clinical work drew severe criticism and was finally rejected. Mann also documents the period confusion of spermine with piperazine: piperazine was sold by a Berlin pharmaceutical firm under the trade name 'Spermin,' and as late as 1903 the formula of piperazine appeared under the name spermine in a standard chemical handbook. Mann cautions that polyamines do have pharmacodynamic activity and that parenteral spermine is toxic in animals (Rosenthal, Fisher and Stohlman, 1952), so he does not dismiss spermine as inert, only Poehl's specific doctrine. Bibliographic fields (title, author, publisher, year) copied from the archive.org item metadata (biochemistryofse00mann); text read from the digitized full text.
NOTES
Mann’s The Biochemistry of Semen is the principal modern secondary source for the disconfirmation in this case. It places Poehl’s spermine theory in the long history of the seminal crystal (Leeuwenhoek 1677 onward), records that the theory was severely criticized and ultimately rejected, and documents that turn-of-the-century commercial “Spermin” was frequently piperazine rather than spermine. Mann is careful not to overstate: he notes that spermine, as a biological polyamine, has genuine pharmacodynamic properties and is toxic parenterally in animals, so the rejection is of Poehl’s rejuvenation-and-antitoxin doctrine, not of spermine’s existence or activity.