Many people have never heard of vibrational essences and even if they have, are not very sure on what it means. Vibrational essences create energy centers for the human body using plants, gems and mineral based essences. The resonance or vibration of the material used corresponds with the patient’s physical, emotional and spiritual characteristics. Vibrational essences are used in homeopathy often as they are also based on holistic healing like homeopathy.

A doctor with a difference

Dr. Sandra Kamiak, a homeopathic doctor in the Bay area uses vibrational essences quite often as part of her treatment for various health problems. Vibrational essences block negative energy and help the body focus its positive energy towards the illness, which helps alleviate the symptoms. It works to harmonize the body’s physical, emotional and spiritual balance. You can contact this natural doctor at (408) 741-1332 to make an appointment.

This natural doctor has a degree in medicine and went on to train in alternative fields of medicine as she believed that holistic healing was a better way of helping her patients. Her working hours are between 9:00 am – 8:00 pm Monday through Friday by appointment. So check out her website at http://www.sandrakamiakmd.com/index.html and learn more about this holistic healer and what she offers.

[click on photo for larger image]

The above is the scheme of Spinoza’s implicit theory of a prophetic imagination, come from his letter to Peter Balling (17), where a father writes about his premonition of his son’s death. The pertinent description from which this is drawn I quote:

To take an example like yours, a father loves his son that he and his beloved are as though one and the same. According to what I have demonstrated on another occasion, there must be in thought an idea of the affections of the son’s essence, and what follows; and the father, through the union he has with his son, is a part of the said son, because necessarily the father’s soul from the son’s ideal essence, and with the affections of the same, through this, to what follows he must participate (as I have demonstrated elsewhere at greater length). Next, since the father’s soul participates ideally in this – in the things which follow from the son’s essence – he (as I have said) can sometimes imagine something of what follows from his [the son's, implied] essence as vividly as if he had it before his eyes…

Jacko is set to become a diamond

Well it was only a matter of time before someone would get round to producing Michael Jackson relics. That company LifeGem that I have told you about before is set to make artificial diamonds from strands of MJ’s hair.

The bitter irony which seems to have escaped the company is that the hair they have obtained comes from the incident when MJ’s hair caught fire in 1984 on the set of  a Pepsi commercial he was filming. This accident left him with major burns and no doubt contributed to his use and dependence on painkillers – a dependence that would later kill him (assuming the conspiracy theorists have got the murder explanation wrong).

Jacko’s hair will be carbonized and turned into about 10 diamonds. In 2007, a lock of Beethoven’s hair was similarly turned into a diamond that sold for $200,000 so I guess LifeGem will make a small killing. The king of pop will become a relic.

Thanks to Konrad for alerting me to this one.

Erster Eintrag für Tanja!

Red Chestnut Essence                               ‘Walking your Talk’

(aesculus x carnea)

Awen Essences Red Chestnut Tree Flower Essence

•  Red chestnut essence is a good essence for those who are easily influenced, or thrown of balance by external influences, such as what others say or do, worrying about them or about what will happen next. When we judge and label things in our minds we create barriers, both within ourselves, and between us and everyone else.

• Red Chestnut helps to restore a sense of acceptance and openness, and helps one learn to be calm within when looking out. Also for those who are usually capable but may have become ‘bogged down’ in some way by the stresses of their lives. Red chestnut helps to restore a much-needed sense of perspective and balance.

• Energetic correspondances – Energy is brought downwards, grounding and warming. Lung meridian, stomach & spleen meridians activated.

To find out more or to get yourself a bottle of red chestnut essence please visit my website at  www.AwenEssences.co.uk

Princess Diana's Biggest Mistake?

Some may regard her biggest mistake was her marriage to Prince  Charles. Others think it was failing to wear a seat belt. But for one happy memorabilia collector, it is a big rubber (that’s eraser to you sniggering US visitors) that used to belong Princess Diana. Yesterday, an old rubber was auctioned and sold for £540 ($890) to a Swiss collector surpassing previous estimates. This is yet another example of people paying large amounts of money for mundane objects that are elevated to special status by their previous owner. For some reason, the Princess held on to this rubber she first acquired as a teenager. Maybe it was a private joke. 

In contrast, her nemesis, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall is not regarded as Royality by many loyal Diana fans. Her memorabilia is unlikely to fetch anywhere near the prices that Diana memorabilia will continue to fetch well into the future. Maybe this is why the toilet seat that Camilla sat on during an impromptu visit to an East Sussex pub only sold for £87 ($100).

Touched by royality? - I think not.

The landlady of the pub said, “I went to open the latch on the door, then low and behold Camilla was standing there. She smiled, said hello and I thought ‘What do I do? Curtsey or bow? She asked if she could use the toilet and I said ‘Of course you can. The toilet still needs to be decorated, but they are spotlessly clean’. She said ‘It’s fine, don’t worry’.” The landlady  added: “I’ve never sat on a public toilet, but after she left I went in there and said ‘My derriere has been touched by royalty’.”

Fat chance. I bet Camilla did what everybody does when using a public toilet. She carefully laid strips of toilet paper around the rim of the seat so that she could avoid the common touch! I wonder what the People’s Princess, who had the common touch, would have done?

Would you willing accept an organ transplant from a murderer? This goes a bit further than wearing the clothing of a killer that I discuss in SuperSense. For many there is a fear of taking on the psychological states and even memories of the donor. As noted in an earlier post, such notions of cellular memories are surprisingly persistent. In 1988, Claire Sylvia a US woman in her forties with primary pulmonary hypertension had a heart and lung transplant to save her life. After the operation she reported a change in her personality that she attributed to taking on aspects of the personality from the donor. Her book, wittily entitled “A Change of Heart,” documented her experiences and was offered as evidence for the pseudoscientific theory of cellular memories, where psychological properties are thought to be encoded in organ tissue and can be transplanted into a new host.

One recent small study of transplant patients reported that one in three thought they had taken on some aspect of personality from the donor. There is also the case in 1999 of the terminally-ill British teenager who was forcibly given a heart transplant against her will because she feared she would lose her own identity with someone else’s heart. Clearly this belief is not a trivial issue.

I spoke with a leading Bristol transplant surgeon about this and he explained that there were many physiological reasons why patients experience a change in personality, not mention the simple fact that they have been given a second lease of life in a situation where it is difficult enough to find donor organs. However, Claire Sylvia didn’t just report a change in personality. She developed an inexplicable taste for beer, chicken nuggets and found herself strangely attracted to short blonde women. You guessed it. The 18-yr-old male who was the donor for her heart and lungs, liked his beer and chicken nuggets and had a short blonde girlfriend.

Some patients believe not only that they take on aspects of the donor’s personality but in some cases they form a psychic bond. This is what Ian and Lynda Gammons reported following the successful transplantation of one of Lynda’s kidneys in a life-saving operation for husband.

When I spoke with one of the coordinators for the National transplant programme that just happens to be based in Bristol, she was fairly dismissive of these reports and concerns. I am not sure whether she misunderstood my line of enquiry and thought that I really did believe in cellular memory or she was being evasive. Anyway, it was clear to me that this could be a sensitive issue.

Despite my fascination with this supernatural belief, I don’t think that it is ethically appropriate to interview transplant patients about whether they have concerns about cellular memories from their implanted organs. There are far more serious issues to consider. 

So we conducted a study of healthy adults just to get a sense of attitudes towards whether people would be concerned about the identity of the donor. We got them to rate 20 faces along a number of dimension including how happy would they be to receive a life-saving heart transplant from that person. This gave us our baseline scores. We then repeated the questions for the same 20 faces mixed among another 20 distractor faces. This time we told them that the potential donor was either a convicted murderer of voluntary worker. 

The study which is currently in press with the Journal of Culture & Cognition reveals that you get overall positive (halo) effects when you learn someone is a good person and overall negative (horns) effects when you discover that they are evil. The effect is strongest for the killer’s heart. A second study replicated the effect and found no difference between a potential heart versus liver transplant. Maybe people just think killers are more likely to have diseased organs. Except that the halo and horns effects are found for all questions that are irrelevant to lifestyle. Rather I would submit that psychological essentialism (the idea that identity and morality) are believed to be encoded in the body is the primary reason that people fear the heart of a killer.

There is something unnatural about genetic engineering that alarms most members of the public. Even without a full appreciation of the potential problems that genetic modification could produce, Joe Public doesn’t like the idea of scientist’s playing God. That’s how most people refer to this new field. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong about inserting the genes of one life form into another.

There are indeed potential problems with genetic modification (GM) as one has to be careful not to produce unforeseen mutations that have negative consequences. One of the problems of GM is that it by-passes the longer, winnowing processes of natural selection where diversity emerges within the context of an environment of competing life forms.  It’s the laboratory equivalent of importing cane toads to Australia that have no natural predator and then discovering decades later that your environment is overrun with these reviled amphibians.

However, I don’t think the general public are primarily concerned by the problem of unforeseen consequences but rather people are appalled by the transformation of life forms in principle. There is something very wrong about mixing different life forms or at least that’s how the public view it.

I think that this concern reflects a naïve essentialist belief that species are categorically different from each other. This biological essentialism emerges early in child development and before children have been educated about genes and DNA. Rather, our naïve biological reasoning leads us to draw a distinction between life forms by inferring some deeper mechanism that makes life essentially different from each other.

This week we learn that Japanese scientists have bred GM monkeys with feet that glow fluorescent green under ultraviolet light. This is because they have had the green fluorescent protein (GFP) marker gene inserted. Why might you ask do we need transgenic marmosets with feet that glow fluorescent green in the first place? The answer is that GFP can be used as a marker to track the effects of genetic manipulation. Last year’s Nobel prize was given to the scientist who discovered and developed the GFP marker technique. 

I would imagine that most of the general public would probably have no particularly concern about this study as the research seems so academic. However, I bet there would be more public outcry if they knew that the GFP was originally isolated from a jellyfish.  This jellyfish gene has been successfully used with many different plants and animals but the marmoset study is the first time that primates have produced offspring that carry the GM trait allowing a colony of transgenic animals to be produced.

The idea of plants and primates having jellyfish genes seems so unnatural but then that simply reflects our misunderstanding of what genes are. Our naïve biological essentialism simply does not easily allow for the concept that all life forms share a common set of genes. Humans may share around 98.5% of their genetic make-up with our closest cousin the chimpanzee but we also share around 50% with a banana. That just doesn’t seem right.

Maybe the mother of one of the twin marmosets agreed as she bit it to death. Or maybe the Japanese mother marmoset mistook the glowing green feet for wasabi.

The BBC correspondent Heather Alexander highlighted a feature this morning on Breakfast Time television about the Eternal Reefs company in the US who, for a fee of up to $6,495 (£4,000), will incorporate the ashes of a loved one into a concrete pod that is designed to encourage marine life and coral once deposited 3 miles off the coast. So far, around 1,000 such reef balls have been dropped on the ocean floor.

Families and friends are invited and encouraged to attend and participate in the casting of their loved ones.  The process includes mixing the remains into an environmentally safe concrete reef mixture to create their Memorial Reef. According to the website, “Once the Memorial Reefs have been cast, family and friends are given the opportunity to put handprints and written messages in the damp concrete reef mixture. Many loved ones feel this is a wonderful way to stay in touch for eternity.”

I don’t regard this as reefer madness. The interviews with the relatives were very revealing about the way many felt that the deceased would still be alive as part of a living coral reef.  This is a manifestation of essentialism and mind/body dualism that is so typical of the supersense, but one with good ecological intentions. As manager George Frankel said in the interview, “It’s a win-win situation for the relatives and the fish.”

Olive + Lavender = Ginger

Two German Air Force sergeants are currently facing a court martial for preparing sausages made from their own blood based on one of their grandmother’s old recipes. According to the report, they had plans to develop a line of blood sausages using friends and comrades. Apparently the scheme only came to light when a fellow soldier questioned whether donating blood for sausage making was part of their duties.

Having been to Munich and Leipzig I can attest that Germans really enjoy their meat. At one evening dinner as part of a protracted job interview, the hosts took great delight in feeding me bollocks and I am not talking about the nature of the job requirements and duties I would be expected to undertake. No, Germans love to eat meat and are also partial to the occasional sweet

Armin Meiwes

pork. In SuperSense, I talk about Armin Meiwes, the Rotenburg cannibal, who killed and ate Bernd Brandes. What’s so disturbing about this case is that Bernd was a willing victim but read the book for the more unbelievable aspects.

Human blood sausages and cannibalism smack of vital essentialism and if you find it going on in the elite of the German Air Force, then frankly what hope have we for eradicating such medieval beliefs?

While we are still on the mummy theme, I saw on the PT site that a few Buddhist temples in northern Japan house a number of “living mummies.” In an attempt to achieve Nirvana, these monks had to undergo a gruesome three-step process:

1) Eat a diet of nuts and seeds, exercising vigorously for 1,000 days to rid the body of fat.

2) Eat only bark and roots for the next 1,000 days while sipping on poisonous tea made from the sap of the urushi tree. 

3) Finally retreat to an underground tomb and meditate until dead. Leave for 1,000 days and voila, if the corpse is still well preserved, then they are deemed to be a living mummy.

This reminded me of the medieval delicacy of mellified man described by Mary Roach in her gloriously hilarious book, “Stiff.” Mellified man was a delicate sweet used for medicinal purposes and was allegedly prepared in the following way according to the Chinese Materia Medica (1597),

“… In Arabia there are men 70 to 80 years old who are willing to give their bodies to save others. The subject does not eat food, he only bathes and partakes of honey. After a month, he only excretes honey (the urine and feces are entirely honey) and death follows. His fellow men place him in a stone coffin full of honey in which he macerates. The date is put on the coffin giving the year and month. After a hundred years, the seals removed. A confection is formed which is used for the treatment of broken bones and wounded limbs. A small amount taken internally will immediately cure the complaint”

Such an account seems entirely fanciful but there was a roaring trade in the apocatheries of Europe for elixir made from North African mummies. Mummy elixir was so popular that it created a black market trade with grave robbing and faked mummies, a situation that has not changed today. Today, the practice is more motivated by selling corpses to gullible collectors rather than those seeking a quick human nibble. Needless to say, this all smacks of human essentialist reasoning where eating human flesh is believed to bestow some magical power.

With such a plethora of supersense related stories to report this week I thought I would investigate this one. Consider this. If you and I are a couple and we decide to make a doll from the hair on our heads, that said doll would be half mine and half yours and nobody else’s – yes? Now imagine that the said doll disappears but that you and I discover the whereabouts of its location some several years later. Who does it belong to? You and I – yes? So would it be wrong for the authorities to destroy the doll? It seems an obvious yes.

Now replace hair with DNA and try the logic again. While going through his personal records, the parents of Mark Speranza discovered that their dead son deposited his semen in a tissue bank in New York six months before he died of cancer  more than 10 years ago. His parents sought to reclaim their son’s sperm in order to impregnate a surrogate mother but had their claim refused in a court of law this week. They argued that as they had paid the yearly maintenance fee for the sample, they were entitled to it. However, the court ruled that handing over the sample would violate the rule that all sperm must be screened  before impregnation.

Somehow I think this is just a health technicality. We all know that the real reason is not concern about giving birth to a damaged baby but rather the ethical validity of parents raising their children from the dead, or at least their belief they can. What do you think?

In ‘SuperSense’ I discuss the odd attitude that we have towards revering the remains of the dead. I think that relics are a manifestation of such essentialist beliefs. Usually, relics are bones from saints, but ironically, the same veneration has been applied to the middle finger of one of the earliest martyrs of science, Galileo Galilei.  

As most of you know, Galileo famously fell out with the Catholic Church after defending Copernicus’s discovery that the earth moved round the sun and was charged with heresy. He was ordered to be imprisoned, a sentence that was commuted to house arrest where he spent his final 9 years. 

Recently, British and Italian scientists have applied to the Catholic Church to exhume the remains of Galileo to determine whether he suffered from degenerative visual impairment.

Currently, Galileo’s middle digit is on display in the History of Science Museum in Florence. It is mounted on a marble base inside a glass egg and is said to be pointing towards Rome.  One might think he has had the last laugh.

The desire to share an intimacy with lovers, even after they are gone has a long history. During the Victorian era, it was fashionable to have the hair of the deceased made into mourning jewelry. Today, you can have the cremated remains of the deceased made into a diamond. From as little as £2,500, LifeGem will create a diamond in white, blue, red, green or yellow. And for those of the animal persuasion, they offer a similar service for pets.

On the other hand you don’t have to wait for your beloved to be dead. Just take them along to Guy’s Hospital London where the good dentists will extract their wisdom teeth and then grow them up in a bone medium large enough to create a disc from which jewelers can fashion engagement rings with inscription “Forever, and for always.”  Clearly the desire to have your partner wrapped around your finger extends well into essentialism.

Which reminds me. What ever happened to that vial of Billy Bob Thorton’s blood that Angelina Jolie used to wear round her neck? Did she bury it, drink it or flush it down the toilet?

An article appeared in this week’s New York Times about the plight of albinos in Tanzania which  reminds us that supernatural beliefs sometimes lead to appalling acts and that witchcraft is not always a harmless foible of human belief.

Since 2007, more than 40 albinos have been killed by gangs of men who hack off legs, heads and genitals to be used in various muti practices. Apparently the going rate for an albino corpse is $2,000. One trader caught with the head of an albino baby was taking it to a businessman who was prepared to pay for it by weight.

Even though 170 have been arrested for these attacks, not one has been prosecuted demonstrating a lack of conviction to stamp these atrocities out. Last month the Tanzanian government banned traditional healers and revoked licenses but with such supernatural beliefs deeply ingrained in the population, it will be a difficult practice to eradicate. Four of those charged with these crimes are police officers. 

There are 17,000 albinos in Tanzania, so the potential for slaughter of these ostracized individuals is not acceptable. It is bad enough to have medical problems associated with albinism, but  to be feared and shunned with the constant threat of mutilation or death seems outrageous.

Thankfully, former Baptist minister Peter Ash, himself an albino from Canada has stepped in to try and help the situation with his charity “Under the Same Sun.” I have signed the online petition to help embarrass the Tanzanian government into doing more to stop these attacks. I hope you do as well.

Geronimo, the last great war chief of the Apache Indians, is not at piece. To be more precise, he may be in pieces. This is the claim from his great grandson, Harlyn Geronimo who launched a lawsuit against the US government this week. 

Geronimo famously led an Apache uprising with some success against the US forces during the Indian wars towards the end of the 1880’s. He eluded capture by 5,000 soldiers who set out specifically to track him down and was reputed to have magical power. Geronimo eventually surrendered in 1886. 

After being paraded around various Wild West Shows and riding during Roosevelt’s inaugural parade, Geronimo ended his days as a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma dying from pneumonia at the age of 79. According to Fort Sill, the remains of Geronimo are under a stone pyramid monument at Fort Sill where he was buried 100 years ago.

Harlyn believes that some of his ancestor’s bones have in fact gone to university.Bizarrely, he believes that his great grandfather’s skull is currently being fetishized at Yale’s infamous ‘Skull & Bones’ fraternity society. Famous alumni include the current ex-presidents, Bush & Son. 

Harlyn is seeking an order to dig up Geronimo’s grave and recover all his ancestor’s relics so that they can be re-buried at the site of his birth in New Mexico. Has this man lost his marbles? Clearly he, like most, has supernatural beliefs about the bones of the deceased and the need to re-unite the remains in death. We had a similar case in Bristol a few years back, where angry parents where horrified to discover that small samples of body tissue removed during the autopsy of their dead children where being kept in storage for analysis. The parents demanded that these various slivers of diseased tissue were buried again with their children as if somehow their children were not complete and could not be laid to rest. 

Meanwhile, Harlyn, who is now 81, has been mocked by the authorities but I think there is some merit to the old indian’s concerns. Apparently, a letter from 1918 from one Yale Bonesman to another, was discovered by researchers a few years ago which read, “The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrrible, exhumed ffrom Fort Sill by your club…is now safe inside [the clubhouse] together with his well worn femurs, bit & saddle horn.”

And who was alleged to have committed this act of grave-robbing? None other than Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W.

You may shudder at the udder thought of it, but the Cow Protection Department of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s biggest and oldest Hindu nationalist group, plans to launch a new drink, cow urine in a can.

The cow is sacred in Hindu society and the belief is that drinking its urine and eating small amounts of cow poop is good for you. Don’t worry, we are informed that once processed, the cow pee, ”won’t smell like urine and will be tasty too.” Oh, that’s ok then. Can I have mine as an ice-cream float?

Unlike Coca-Cola and Pepsi, it is believed that cow urine is medicinal. They plan to take on Coca-Cola and Pepsi and even export to outside of India.

Somehow, I think that teaching the whole world to sing is easier that getting them to swallow this supernatural belief.

Last week, a Cleveland Clinic announced that the first US face transplant patient had been discharged. Her identity and the circumstances surrounding her loss of face have been kept a closely guarded secret for obvious reasons, unlike Isabelle Dinoire, the French lady, whose face was partially chewed off by her dog, was mawkishly paraded in front of the world’s media.

What does it mean to have a face transplant? Unlike other transplantation procedures, the face transplant is not necessary to prolong life but rather it allows those who are hideously disfigured  to re-enter a society. 

But what of wearing someone else’s face? What are the psychological implications? We have just had an academic paper accepted for publication which examines our essentialist anxieties concerning organ transplantation from another individual. In a hypothetical situation, we asked adults to rate how happy they were to receive organ transplant from others after learning about their moral background. We are much happier to accept an organ donation from someone who has led a morally upright life but much more adverse to receiving a life-saving organ transplant from a murderer. It’s a massive effect.

Fairly obvious and all hypothetical you might argue, but in 1999, a fifteen-year-old girl with terminal heart disease was forcibly given a heart transplant because she refused to agree to the life-saving operation because she thought she would lose her own identity. Psychological essentialism is not just an abstract academic pursuit of mine. It has tangible consequences for the way we reason about decisions regarding the assimilation of other people’s bodily tissue. For example, it not only influences the way we regard organ transplantation but also whether we are willing to give consent for the donation of organs from loved ones. After all, many relatives believe that their deceased loved one lives on in the new body.

A face transplant must be the most difficult challenge to the sense of one’s own identity. Good luck to the poor women.

Following from my post about “The Gonad Doctors,” Arno alerted me to a recent article translated from the German Newspaper ‘Speigel,’ about a forthcoming book by medical historian, Dr. Richard Sugg of Durham University on medicinal cannibalism. I particularly like the story about Pope Innocent VIII drinking the blood of three murdered boys. Now, if ever there was a name that was a misnomer.

In the book, Dr. Sugg’s makes the claim that pre-enlightenment medicine regularly used bodies parts for cures.

In SuperSense, I mention Paracelsus, one of the leading alchemists of the day and his particular recipe for a weapon salve. Weapon salves were thought to cure wounds inflicted by weapons by treating the instrument responsible for the injury. Paracelsus wrote,

“ Take of moss growing on the head of a thief who has been hanged and left in the air; of real mummy; of human blood, still warm – of each one ounce; of human suet, two ounces; of linseed oil, turpentine, and Armenian bole – of each two drachms. Mix all well in a mortar, and keep the salve in an oblong, narrow urn.”

Once this ointment was prepared, it was important to recover the original weapon and dip it in the ointment. In the meantime, the wound was to be cleaned regularly with fresh water and bandages each day after the removal of ‘laudable pus.’ 

The logic of the weapon salve reveals a number of supernatural misconceptions. The weapon had a sympathetic connection with the wound by virtue of the fact that it had inflicted it. The various ingredients for the salve were chosen because they had sympathetic affinity with the healing process. Some ingredients may have been chosen because they were believed to counteract the negative aspects of infection by exerting antipathetic forces to cancel them out. The gruesome ingredients of the potion demonstrate essentialist thinking. The use of human tissue reflected the belief that it possesses essential forces that can affect the healing process. Particularly prized was the tissue from those who had died healthy and young; no one wanted rejuvenating fat and blood from either the ill or old. Hence, most recipes called for the use of those who had been executed, the younger and more virile the better, as the young had more life force in them than the sick and dying.

If any of this ancient witchcraft  sounds familiar then maybe you have been speaking to a homeopath recently. The logic behind most homeopathic cures involves the same magical laws of sympathy and antipathy. The only difference is that the dilutions are so weak that they are indistinguishable from pure water. But that’s another post for later.

With it’s medieval origins and wacky logic, you don’t get such supernatural thinking in today’s modern healthcare system, do you?

This one is for “poietes” and her last comment, but really I do need to start  sharing some of the strange stories that I have covered in my quest to unravel the human SuperSense. The book will be published in 70 days. Yikes. So here is a snippet. In it I talk about the amazing story  of Dr. John Brinkley.

As a trainee medical student, John Brinkley worked in  a Kansas slaughterhouse and noticed that the prowess of billy goats. What made them so jumpy?  The owner of the goat farm had been complaining of reduced libido and Brinkley suggested inserting male goat gonads in to the aging farmer’s scrotum.

The operation worked, and the aging farmer went on to father a son, called “Billy” no less. John Brinkley went on to earn a fortune and the mighty and rich on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to pay large amounts of money to have the gonads of others inserted into  their scrotums. I don’t want to give the whole story away but it involved huge amounts of money, crime, international outrage, an attempt to be elected governor, and possibly the explanation for how HIV transferred from monkeys to man. I think you will enjoy the story.

Needless to say, this type of thinking is pure essentialism where we believe we can absorb the youthful properties of others  through intimate contact. Yes, the gonads are a source of vital hormones but inserting another animal’s or man’s family jewels will not make you more vibrant.