S. Voronoff performing an appendectomy (lit. binding of the middle-appendix in his hospital at Choubrah; at the same time, with the patient anaesthetised, a dance in honour of Congressistes (doctors of the Congress of Tropical Medicine in Cairo) is started.From: Chanteclair, 1910
Serge Voronoff was appointed surgeon to Khedive Abbas-Hilmi of Egypt. In Cairo he was President of the Faculty of Medicine, President of the Académie de Médecine, and Editor of the Presse Médicale of Egypt. He also created at his own expense the hospital at Choubrah. For his many services Abbas-Hilmi conferred upon him the cordon of the Legion of Honor affiliated with the Grand Croix of the Medijeh.
It was in Egypt that Voronoff made his infamous discovery:
“My attention was drawn to the importance of the glands, and particularly those concerned with procreation, while I was surgeon to the Khedive of Egypt. One of the eunuchs who died at 45 looked like a man of 90. It demonstrated a fact now well known, that the male glands are not occupied entirely with procreation; they have one secretion for that purpose and another which puts force and energy into the muscles and the mind.”~From an interview in TIME, May 12, 1924
“Having been physician to the Khedive of Egypt, I had special opportunities of pursuing my researches and of observing eunuchs in the Khedive’s harem. They are corpulent, flabby, sluggish and constipated. Their intestinal functions are sluggish. All these eunuchs die young in years though apparently old.”
~From Dr. Voronoff’s 1920 Lecture on The Interstitial Glands
(Abbas Hilmi, 1874–1944, last khedive of Egypt (1892–1914); son and successor of Tewfik Pasha. Nominally he ruled in subordination to the Ottoman Empire, but in fact Egypt was controlled by the British resident—at first Lord Cromer, and later Lord Kitchener. Although he resisted complete British rule, Abbas met with little success; in 1899 he was forced to admit the British claim to rule jointly with Egypt over Sudan. When Turkey joined the Central Powers in World War I, Britain declared Egypt a British protectorate and deposed Abbas. He lived thereafter in Switzerland, where he died. He wrote The Anglo-Egyptian Settlement (1930).
A full biography of the Last Egyptian Khedive is available at About.com
