Virility Transplanted

Wherever the Germans retreat, they leave land mines behind. And wherever there are land mines (particularly the specially developed "castrator mine") some Allied soldiers are sure to suffer the most inhumane of all war wounds. Genital injuries have driven hundreds of men to suicide in World Wars I and II.

A freckled, red-haired Red Army surgeon named Anatole Frumkin, of Moscow, has developed an international reputation by successfully repairing hundreds of these once hopeless wounds. Dr. Frumkin jokingly says he now gets so many inquiring letters from abroad that he could start the world's biggest mail-order business.

For reconstructing external organs, Dr. Frumkin ingeniously adapts well-tried plastic surgery techniques -- a tube of flesh transferred from the abdomen, a strip of cartilage from a rib. But until recently he shook his head when both testicles were destroyed. Without their hormones, he knew, his patient must inevitably be come effeminate in appearance and action -- a eunuch.

Last spring a Red Army colonel, red-headed as Dr. Frumkin, was brought in with such a wound. With the colonel's permission, Dr. Frumkin decided to chance an operation that most doctors frown upon: he would give the colonel another man's testicle. The operation had to wait until the right donor was found, someone newly dead whose blood type matched the colonel's. The needed gland was eventually supplied by a young man killed in a streetcar accident.

Instead of planting the gland in the scrotum, Dr. Frumkin put it in a pocket in the colonel's thigh where its veins and arteries could be linked with the big vein and artery of the leg, thus insuring a good blood supply. The results were spectacular. The colonel's piping voice went down, his red beard sprouted anew, the fat around his hips disappeared, and he began to take an interest in women again.

The colonel now feels fine, commands his regiment, enjoys a normal sex life. (He is sterile; Dr. Frumkin will not try to connect the delicate sperm-carrying tubules.)

By his operation on the colonel, Dr. Frumkin got much the same results that can be achieved by regular hormone injections or by pellets of slow-dissolving hormones implanted under the skin (TIME, Oct. 3, 1938). Many U.S. doctors say that such a grafted gland will inevitably wither & die after, at most, four years.

Dr. Frumkin hopes his colonel may prove the greybeards wrong, but admits that only time can tell.

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