Many people fell in love with Professor Preobrazhensky immediately and forever. Especially after Evgeny Evstigneev played this role in the famous film. And the author of "Heart of a Dog" Mikhail Bulgakov obviously sympathized with the professor. But the prototype of Preobrazhensky was an adventurer, who may have awarded humanity with the immunodeficiency virus …
Remember how in the story "Heart of a Dog" Professor Preobrazhensky rants that "only landlords who have not been cut by the Bolsheviks eat cold snacks and soup?" Teaches his assistant Bormental: "You need to be able to eat …". Or pompously discusses how many rooms a "self-respecting person" needs. Teaches visitors: "… you inherited me on the carpets, and all my carpets are Persian." In a word, he behaves like a nouveau riche who has recently broken into the “people”. This is exactly what his prototype did - Dr. Serge Voronoff. True, he was proud not of carpets or rooms, but of a chateau in France, round-the-clock security and a wife who was good for him as a granddaughter.
The secret of the eunuchs
In Europe, doctors were known under the name Serge Voronoff. And living near Tambov, he was Samuil Voronov, born in 1866, who at the age of 18 went to study at the Sorbonne. The talented Russian student received his knowledge of organ transplantation from the future Nobel laureate, eugenic surgeon Alexis Karrel.
Then, becoming a physician in the court of the Khedive of Egypt, Voronov founded a hospital, a nursing school and a medical journal in Cairo. There he was observing the eunuchs who "suggested" him a way to rejuvenate. The surgeon concluded that castrates age faster. So, he decided, he just needed to spur the elderly body by transplanting young spermatic glands. Transplantation of glands of young gobies and lambs added, as it seemed to the innovator, to the agility of old males …
At the height of the First World War, Ravens again found themselves in France. Now he is the chief surgeon of the Russian military hospital. The weekly Iskra (this is Sytin's magazine, not Lenin's Iskra) published an article in 1914 about “our compatriot” who gave an idiot boy “an inoculation of a monkey's thymus gland. The success exceeded expectations. The boy's eyes revived, mental abilities, intelligence, curiosity appeared."
This was only the beginning of experiments on people, under which Voronov summed up the theoretical basis in the book "From a cretin to a genius" back in 1908. But humanity was more interested not in intelligence, but in eternal youth. Starting in the 1920s to transplant the gonads of monkeys to humans (more precisely, adding thin sections of primate organs to human ovaries), the doctor became fabulously rich.
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Unpredictable consequences
In the early 1930s, the nouveau riche appeared on the Cote d'Azur near Menton, making a lot of noise. This was Dr. Voronov. In the old chateau of the Grimaldi family, he equipped a laboratory and a monkey nursery with a team of veterinarians. He started a staff of servants, secretaries, guards, chauffeurs, as well as expensive mistresses.
“Will the monkey surpass man… with a stronger physical shell, less susceptible to bad heredity: gout, alcoholism, syphilis? I can say that with thyroid and testicular transplants, monkey organs gave better results than human organs,”wrote Dr. Voronov.
Remember, Dr. Preobrazhensky promised the patient to transplant the ovaries of a monkey for "50 ducats"? Voronov's prices were much more impressive. Just like his patients: millionaires, politicians and show business stars in France, America, England. Voronov's fame was great. Delegates to the International Congress of Surgeons in 1923 in London gave a standing ovation to the report of the richest physician in the world.
His name did not leave the front pages of Western media.
Everything collapsed overnight when one of the "rejuvenated" died. Other patients spoke in chorus about the placebo effect, claiming that the surge of energy after transplants was short-lived. Now the media was throwing mud at yesterday's hero and he became depressed.
When the Nazis occupied France, the doctor and his wife took refuge in the United States. He left on the farm, and in fact “framed” his brother Alexander, who as a result died in Auschwitz. After the war, in the devastated estate, Voronova was met only by a flock of hungry monkeys.
Nowadays, some people call the scandalous doctor the culprit for the appearance of AIDS, as a result of his experiments on transplanting the testicles of chimpanzees and gorillas to people. Others consider him the founder of the immortality of future humanity. Still others just grin at the sight of a rarity of the 20th century: figurines of a monkey covering the lower abdomen with its paws, and the signature: "No, Voronoff, you won't take me!"
Magazine: Mysteries of History No. 3, Lyudmila Makarova