In a few of his purports, Srila Prabhupada mentions people implanting the testicles of monkeys into human beings as a way to cure impotence in old men. On 5.14.30, for example, he mentions:

“Monkeys are very expert in sexual enjoyment, and sometimes sex glands are taken from monkeys and placed in the human body so that a human being can enjoy sex in old age. In this way, modern civilization has advanced. Many monkeys in India were caught and sent to Europe so that their sex glands could serve as replacements for those of old people.”

One may think that this may be some kind of mistake, but it’s not. Bizarre as it may seem, such operations we indeed quite popular during the first half of the last century. A Russian surgeon called Sergei Abrahamovitch Voronoff created a “treatment” that consisted of inserting tiny slices of baboons’ and chimpanzees’ testicles into the scrotum of men. These fragments were just a few millimeters in size, and thus they would merge into the human tissue without causing rejection, as a normal transplant would do, but it of course could result in the transmission of all kinds of disease, which was not well known at the time.

The first official transplant of a monkey gland on a human body happened on the 12th of June, 1920 and quickly the work of Voronoff gained recognition in scientific circles, attracting many candidates, especially millionaires. By the 1930s thousands of people had already gone through this strange operation, leading to the widespread import of monkeys from India and other countries that Srila Prabhupada describes. Only by the 1940s, the operations were finally branded as bogus and the procedure thrown into the dustbin of history.

All of this illustrates how materialistic people can do everything in an attempt to increase their sense gratification and span of life, and how these attempts will all ultimately result in failure. Just like fell into the quackery of Voronoff in the 1920s and 1930s, many fall today into all kinds of bogus treatments, with similar results. Eventually, all of them will die and all their efforts will be ultimately forgotten.