The Change by Germaine Greer

Author:Germaine Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The most successful elixir of youth was the saline solution of fresh cells from the organs of lamb foetuses which was injected into degenerating tissues in what was known as Niehans’s cellular therapy. A 1990 article in In Health magazine described Paul Niehans as a ‘public relations genius’ and stated that the Clinique La Prairie, which he had founded in Clarens-Montreux, Switzerland, had attracted 65,000 patients. The average age of Niehans’s patients was forty-five. In his view men began to age at sixty when glandular secretions began to fail; women’s biological age was determined by menopause ten years or more earlier.

Niehans treated thousands of powerful men and a few women, among them Gloria Swanson, Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, Marlene Dietrich, the Gish Sisters, Hedda Hopper and Ann Miller. Current advertising by the clinic states that ‘a six-night Weight Management Approach programme costs £13,330; the six-night Revitalization programme is £20,560.’ Patients are advised to return every two years for a top-up.

In London Niehans’s disciple Peter M. Stephan offered rejuvenating injections of animal cells at £200 a course. He advised that a woman should have her first injections at about thirty, and further injections every five years. ‘I don’t promise she won’t age,’ he said, ‘but she will age well and comparatively slowly … She will most likely look anything from ten to fifteen years younger than she is all her life’ (Hannon, p. 106). Accepters of what Stephan called Therapeutic Immunology could expect memory to improve, tiredness to vanish, skin, hair and nails to improve, muscles to refirm, lines to fade and face to sag less and less. In New Life for Old (1980) David Abbott included case histories such as that of Patient B, who first approached Stephan when she was forty-five. He diagnosed ‘total exhaustion’ and treated her with extracts of various animal tissues, after which she provided a testimonial stating: ‘I live an 18 hour day to the full and have my health, vitality and looks that reflect both’ (pp. 126–7). Abbott was convinced that Therapeutic Immunology was about to be adopted on a national scale. Stephan stood at the crossroads; he awaited only the indoctrination of all the GPs and the education of secondary school students in the necessary ancillary techniques to sweep aside all other systems of medication and confer upon mankind ‘the secret of eternal youth’.

Having discovered the miraculous properties of Viagra, Big Pharma is now competing to find something to combat lack of interest in sex in women, which has a new name, Female Sexual Dysfunction or FSD. The compound most recently hailed as the ‘female Viagra’ is flibanserin, originally developed as an antidepressant, and now sold as a specific for ‘hypoactive sexual desire disorder’ or HSDD, and sold under the trade name Addyi but, whereas Viagra can be used effectively for men of all ages, flibanserin is considered suitable only for pre-menopausal women, who are probably not the ones who need it. Its effects must be considered less than spectacular. The women

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