The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850-1950
book · 2006
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SUMMARY
Scholarly monograph by Chandak Sengoopta (Birkbeck College, University of London) covering the emergence and cultural reception of sex-hormone science from 1850 to 1950 through case studies drawn from Central Europe, the United States, and Britain. Steinach's vasoligation work is treated as one of several case studies demonstrating how glandular-intervention hopes were shaped by and fed back into cultural preoccupations about sex, gender, and aging. The work draws on primary sources in Viennese institutional archives and is the principal scholarly monograph on the sex-hormone era that includes sustained treatment of Steinach. Publisher page confirmed at University of Chicago Press website; 360 pp, 6 x 9, copyright 2006. ISBN not independently verified from a catalog record in this session: cite as University of Chicago Press, 2006 without ISBN.
NOTES
Sengoopta’s monograph is the standard English-language secondary literature reference for the intellectual and institutional history of sex-hormone science that includes Steinach’s vasoligation. It situates the procedure within the broader arc of endocrinological optimism in early 20th-century Europe and addresses how cultural assumptions about aging, masculinity, and rejuvenation shaped the scientific program. The book’s coverage of Steinach is more historically rigorous than the popular accounts that circulate the Yeats and Freud anecdotes without archival basis. Publisher confirmed via University of Chicago Press website; ISBN not independently catalog-verified in this session and is therefore omitted.