Ballsy

Hey, true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. Dude, bro, listen up. Do you just not feel like yourself these days? Low energy, diminished stamina, less enthusiasm to get out and do the things you love. Wouldn't it be great to feel all that manly power coursing through your veins again like it did when you were younger, when you could party all night, sleep a couple of hours and wake up rock hard and ready to take on the day?

You think losing all this is just part of getting older, but think again. You don't need a time machine to feel like 100% prime, Angus grade human male, but you might need a testicular transplant from a freshly executed killer. And they got a small beam of light again. True. Weird. Stuff. In the last months of 1919, an odd little story appeared in newspapers across the country.

Prisoners in San Quentin Penitentiary, California, regard Dr. Leo Stanley as a wonder worker. Within the last year or so, he has operated upon 10 of the inmates, giving them new interstitial glands from the bodies of executed murderers. There will be another execution this month and the 11th operation will follow. Dr. Stanley is reluctant to talk about his efforts to restore youth, vitality and mentality and productive life, saying that he cannot determine the success of his experiments for three or four years yet.

Cannot tell yet whether the beneficial results so far accruing will be permanent. Well, that's a lot. Let's break it down. The phrase interstitial glands is a very polite euphemism for testicles. If you're thinking, wow, sounds like maybe a prison doctor was conducting some sort of weird medical experiment on the inmates, experiments that involved swapping out the testes of a living inmate with those of a freshly dead inmate.

Do I have that right? You sure do. You have that exactly right. Dr. Leo Stanley was born in Oregon in 1886. He was the son of a country doctor, a career path he intended to follow himself until love and fate knocked a real curve into that path. He grew up mostly in Northern California. His family had moved there when Stanley was nine years old.

He graduated from Paso Robles High School and headed to Stanford University in 1903. Looks like he wasn't quite ready to commit to academics because he dropped out after just one year to work as a newsboy on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Stanley sold snacks and newspapers on the train, a job that they called back then peanut butcher, and he loved it.

Turns out that Stanley had unnatural talent for sales, a talent that he would someday use to his great advantage, but in strange and shocking ways. And the product that he would end up selling most successfully? Stanley eventually hung up his peanut butcher apron and returned to Stanford. He graduated and moved on to the next step in his master plan, medical school.

Not only did Leo Stanley complete his studies at Cooper Medical College in San Francisco and become a doctor, he found love. Her name was Romaine, like the lettuce, and she worked as a secretary at the school. Leo Stanley was smitten, absolutely head over heels. He proposed marriage and the pair tied the knot just one month before graduation.

Now, as an intern, the newly minted Dr. Stanley had no income. Room and board was his only compensation. As a newlywed, Stanley knew that he would have to do far better than that. And that's when the offer came. A chance to serve as resident physician at San Quentin Penitentiary. The job paid a whopping $75 per month.

That doesn't sound like much, but $75 back in 1913 is equivalent to $2400 today. It was a big paycheck for the young doctor because the average yearly income for a medical worker back then was $500 or less per year. So $75 a month? Yes, please. A couple of years before his death in 1976, Stanley reflected on this critical turning point in his life by saying that when he was offered that salary, he jumped at it.

And who wouldn't? Despite the pile of cash thrown at him, Dr. Stanley still planned to be a country doctor. He figured that he'd get some solid experience at San Quentin, establish himself as a practitioner, and then move on to his next opportunity. That isn't how it played out. For better in some ways, and far worse in others.

Because the prison offered something to Stanley. Something that proved to be more alluring than any dream he had of making house calls in rural California. The prison offered Stanley a literally captive population of men on which he could test and refine certain theories he had. Theories about the transmission and treatment of tuberculosis, for example.

Theories about plastic surgery and how improvements to an inmate's appearance might improve their chances of successfully rejoining society upon release from incarceration. And certain theories about male glands. Dr. Stanley did a lot of good at San Quentin. And he did a lot that wasn't good. That was unethical and even inhumane.

That shameful chapter in his career? Well, that's the story that stuck to the man. Because as it turns out, people really only like mad scientists when they're make-believe. You know, licking stories off the wall. Dr. Frankenstein is a great character. But did you want him to be your doctor? What about Dr. Jekyll? It'd probably be okay as long as he didn't morph into Mr. Hyde midway through your pap smear.

But why take the chance? Unfortunately, the inmates at San Quentin didn't have a choice in the matter. But, like we said, Dr. Stanley did a lot of good before he did a whole lot of bad. Let's start with tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, or TB, is caused by a bacterial infection that loves the lungs. Even though it can hit other parts of the body as well.

It has a couple of nicknames. The white death. And that favorite of Victorian novelists? Consumption. The symptoms include fever and fatigue, chills and night sweats, weight loss. It's a weird fact that for the longest time a diagnosis of tuberculosis was thought to boost creativity. The number of legendary artists, writers and musicians who enjoyed poetically wasting away include Chopin, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the painters Munch and Modigliani.

And that's just a handful. Tuberculosis has afflicted humanity since our very beginning. It's been found in the spines of Egyptian mummies and in the skeletal remains of prehistoric humans dating all the way back to 4000 BCE. It's a disease that wasn't even properly identified until the early 19th century. And prior to that, it was a bit of a mystery.

One that was sometimes believed to belong to vampires. Since people back then didn't know about germs and bacteria and didn't understand how many diseases were transmitted. They looked on in horror as entire families would sicken, growing weaker and paler by the day. The first family member to die was thought to be sucking the life out of the others until one by one the entire clan would succumb.

The fearful superstitions that accompanied tuberculosis did probably save some lives. No one dared approach a vampire, right? And since tuberculosis is airborne, transmit it when an infected person coughed or sneezed or sang or shouted. The only real way to protect yourself was to avoid contact with the sick. This was an easy choice.

If you believe that the sick were transforming into undead, unclean, blood sucking monsters. Tuberculosis is still a big public health issue today. A huge public health issue. It's the second leading infectious cause of death worldwide trailing COVID-19. Nearly 11 million people fell ill from TB in 2022 and more than a million people died from it.

Even HIV AIDS can't compete. And with drug resistant strains of tuberculosis now making the rounds. It's what you'd call an urgent public health crisis. Here's the good news, bad news about how contagious tuberculosis is. You're unlikely to catch it from the single sneeze of an infected neighbor. Tuberculosis likes for you to be exposed consistently over a long period of time.

That's why whole families will be taken out by the white death. Huddled in their hobbles, packing infectious droplets all over each other. With no clue as to the how or the why of the terrible sickness. Now, imagine how tuberculosis might thrive in the cramped and close quarters of a prison. Because that's the scenario that Dr. Leo Stanley was confronted with in his new position at San Quentin.

And Stanley was powerfully motivated to tackle the problem of tuberculosis. Because his new bride, his beloved Romaine, had contracted the disease soon after the couple arrived at San Quentin. Her case was severe. She was bedridden. She needed the very best care. And in one of the strangest twists ever, San Quentin turned out to be the place to get it.

That seems crazy, right? That a prison would be the best place for a woman suffering such a serious illness? Here's the deal. When Romaine was diagnosed in 1913, the standard treatment for a tuberculosis patient was basically rest, lots of fresh air, and the very best possible food. In some grim cases, surgery was an option.

Though not one you'd choose if you could help it. Antibiotics? Nope. Not for another 30 plus years. But the scientists who made that breakthrough, Selman Waksman, did end up winning the Nobel Prize for the development of streptomycin. That breakthrough came way too late for Romaine Stanley. She fell sick during the sanitarium era for tuberculosis.

And tuberculosis sanitariums were basically institutions created to isolate TB patients from the rest of the population. They were usually located outside urban areas and were typically very plain in design, which was intended to make the facilities easier to keep clean. Upon admission, patients were placed on strict bed rest.

Those who eventually recovered some degree of mobility were moved into separate housing that offered a bit more freedom. Patients lucky enough to recover to the point of being nearly cured were housed in open air structures, kind of like tiny cottages or shacks for those unable to pay for the finest care. Dr. Stanley and his wife moved into a house on a hilltop overlooking San Quentin.

The prison itself overlooks San Francisco Bay and the same crisp marine air that blew through the cell blocks, blew through the windows of the Stanley home. Fresh air? Check. How about rest? Well, the prison assigned a convicted murderer named Lim Foon to help care for the ailing Mrs. Stanley. Dr. Stanley was delighted by this turn of events, saying that Foon not only made an excellent nurse, but turned out to be quite the cook as well.

So rest and good food? Check and check. Everything that the very best TB sanitarium could offer Romaine Stanley was right here at California's oldest and most famous penitentiary. Oh, wait, you're worried that we're just going to skip past that whole convicted murderer, nursing and cooking situation. No, no, no. We will definitely come back to Mr. Foon.

He deserves to have his story told, even if it's just the tiniest bit of that story. And his being assigned to the Stanley household was a standard practice back then at San Quentin. Prison staffers were allowed to have inmates serve as assistants or cooks or whatever the need might be. And now, with his wife so well cared for, Stanley was free to pursue his medical enthusiasms and ambitions, along with a few other new responsibilities, including the supervision of executions.

He oversaw 150 of those between 1913 and 1940. And as you're about to discover, he was a real waste not want not kind of guy when it came to the body of a freshly deceased prisoner. From his first day on the job, Dr. Stanley immediately set about transforming San Quentin and its population of inmates. Stanley believed that a man's chances of successfully reentering society after incarceration would be significantly better if that man was in robust good health and not just good health, but good appearance, too.

He performed plastic surgery on many inmates who were scheduled to be released and apparently did so with such skill that it was feared that the newly paroled convicts would be unidentifiable to police. The warden at San Quentin was forced to create a new policy for Dr. Stanley's plastic surgery patients. They were rephotographed with their new faces just before leaving the prison behind.

This is an example of how contradictory a man Leo Stanley was. This was the benevolent side of San Quentin's new doctor. But there were other far darker sides to the man. His concern for an inmate's transition to freedom was more than matched by Stanley's horror at the conditions under which he was expected to practice medicine.

But don't start feeling all melty inside of his goodness, because that goodness came wrapped in a filthy agenda. Stanley was appalled by the crowding, by the lack of ventilation, by the poor air quality. But he was equally or maybe more appalled by the lack of segregation at San Quentin. Dr. Stanley was an ardent believer in eugenics.

Though this movement, with its fixation on improving humanity through selective breeding, is an ancient one, like the philosopher Plato was a fan way back in 400 BCE, the Nazis really made it their own. More recently, as in the early 1980s, the founder of the country of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, gave speeches that urged highly educated women to hurry up and have more babies, lest humanity be overrun by the offspring of those with lower IQs and lesser ambitions.

A year later, Singapore was offering these highly educated women money as an incentive to breed. Disbelief and disgust and a huge public uproar put an end to that. Mostly, that's a whole nother story. But back to Dr. Stanley, who was troubled by what he saw as the mixing of so-called undesirable races with white Christians, prison or not.

And this is the fork in the road where we see Dr. Stanley make that sharp turn toward the unethical, the unthinkable and the infamy that is his legacy, because he didn't just want the races separated. He wanted to exert control over who could and could not reproduce. And Stanley's timing was lucky for Stanley, if not the inmates.

And that's because his tenure at San Quentin coincided with the state of California's golden age of forced sterilization. Starting in 1909 and over the next 70 years, the state of California forcibly sterilized more than 20,000 individuals deemed to be criminally minded, suffering from mental illness or of low intellect.

The line between voluntary sterilization and involuntary was blurry at best, and that's where it existed at all. Most of these forced sterilizations went down in mental hospitals, a fact that made Dr. Stanley very salty indeed, because he argued that one in five inmates were unfit to breed and ought to be prevented from taming the gene pool.

He fervently believed that criminality was in the genes, that even a casual glance at a convict's family history would easily prove that. He was irate that he didn't have carte blanche to sterilize any man he found to be of poor genetic quality. Good Lord, bet you did not see that coming in the history of golden, progressive, free spirited California.

Sterilization, when given its chance, will do much to stamp out crime. The right to bear children will in time be reserved to the fit. In addition to his passion for eugenics, Stanley was fascinated by masculinity in all forms. Now, his own bedside manner was a kind of swaggering, hardboiled, tough guy. He hated weakness, despised any bakery or malingering.

He prided himself on his talent for spotting the hypochondriacs and chronic complainers at San Quentin. He refused to mollycoddle inmates, his word, because doing so would only encourage laziness and deception. He said, when one of these individuals comes to the hospital having received a cut finger or some injury in the machinery that necessitates sutures, instead of sympathizing with the individual and allowing him to believe his injuries are quite serious, we assume the opposite attitude toward him and pretend to upbraid him very strongly for his carelessness and getting injured in this way.

Should we be particularly sympathetic, the man's injuries would probably prolong his stay in the hospital. Though they may think they are cruelly treated at the time, they feel much better about it when they have recovered. Honestly, that sounds like a lot of our parents, doesn't it? But of course, that bootstrap approach doesn't fit every situation.

And here's an example. An inmate named Dwight Myers had his hand crushed in the machine gearbox. He described what happened next this way. Well, upon my entrance to the hospital, there was Dr. Miller and Dr. Reynolds and Dr. Stanley were in the room. And Dr. Miller rushed over and said, for God's sake, what is the matter?

And I showed him my hand and he says, rush this man to the operating room. Dr. Stanley says, hell no. Put him over on the table there and get the bone clipper and get to work. And get to work he did with no anesthetic of any kind. It took Myers months to recover. So this is Dr. Leo Stanley with all his very human contradictions and inconsistencies.

Devoted husband, stern taskmaster, visionary man of medicine, cruel and imperious practitioner. A man who did what he could to ease an inmates transition back to society. A man who treated those same inmates as laboratory animals. Which brings us now to the real fun. Stanley's glandular experiments. Glandular and glands again being the tasteful terminology of the day for testicles.

Stanley even managed to bring his zest for forced sterilization together with his firm belief that a man's testicles were central to both his identity and his well-being. In 1935, he posted a sign in the main yard of San Quentin that read. Recent research workers claim the cutting of the G-string in the male increases his general health and vigor.

This simple operation prevents the man from producing children. But it does not interfere with his normal pleasures. In fact, it is claimed that sexual vigor is increased. With local anesthesia, the tube which carries the seed from the testicle is cut. The operation does not lay the patient up. Men having syphilis are less likely to transmit this disease as sterilized.

So anyone who wishes to have this procedure done on him may apply at the line for sterilization. That part about syphilis is dead wrong by the way. In case you happen to be that rare dude listening who's had both a vasectomy and syphilis and is wondering if maybe Dr. Stanley was on to something. Dr. Stanley was not alone in his belief in the power of a robust scrotum.

Starting in the late 1800s, testicular grafting procedures were performed by doctors in both Europe and the United States. The goal was to reverse aging and boost vitality and of course to restore function to men suffering from impotence. But women were also candidates for this miracle cure. And if you're wondering if it worked for women, well I guess if it had, my own balls would be a little more than metaphorical, wouldn't they?

And something else you might be wondering is this, where in the world were all these random transplant ready testicles coming from? It's a fair question. Human testes were always preferred but in a pinch, the testicles of a goat, ram, boar or deer would be used. Dr. Stanley had no qualms about dropping a pair of goat's balls into a human patient but he had far bigger ambitions than any barnyard could satisfy.

So imagine how pleased he was to find himself at San Quentin with its death row, its abundant if not quite bottomless supply of executed inmates. For just one example, let's take a look at Thomas Belton. Belton was executed for the crime of murder on October 10th, 1919. Within an hour of his death, his testes were removed and placed into the scrotum of another inmate whose name was withheld.

That inmate was serving 60 years for manslaughter. He was in poor health, housed in the prison's hospital, his body described as exhausted. But in very dramatic fashion, within three days of receiving Belton's balls, the man showed marked improvement. Suddenly, his posture was straighter, his gait quicker, his voice stronger, his laugh louder.

Within five days, he was discharged from the hospital unit and returned to San Quentin's general population. This despite, as Dr. Stanley marveled, the surgical wound in the man's scrotum had not yet healed. Stanley was cautiously delighted with the results and said with great modesty, The operation, while a delicate one to perform, is not difficult or hard on the patient.

One does struggle to believe that, but here are the basic details. The recipient was given a spinal block, but remained conscious the entire time. Once anesthetized, he awaited the arrival of his donor, who was transferred immediately from the gallows to a slab in the operating room. The recipient watched as Stanley made the incisions in his scrotum and removed his testes.

I mean, I guess they pop right out like grapes or something. I thought they were connected, but who knows? Then, Stanley moved over to the freshly executed corpse, did the exact same, and then carefully tucked the delicate wee things into the waiting sack and stitched it up. Less than an hour later, the recipient was back in his own bed, awaiting his miraculous renewal.

Deeply, as Stanley believed that these donor hormones would go to work immediately, transforming the recipient for the better, it wasn't a perfect operation, and there were many unfortunate outcomes. Shocking, right? But ever the medical pioneer, Stanley persisted with his experiments in endocrinology. He tried mashing the donor testicles into a paste, and then injecting that mixture into the abdomen of the recipient.

He felt certain that this could cure both acne and depression, not to mention erectile dysfunction and pedophilia. Hello, what? Yep. Stanley theorized that pedophilia was the result of old age. In his book, Men at Their Worst, he wrote, This form of insanity can overtake the finest of old men in the best of families. Perhaps the outworn glands look for solace in strange directions.

Their condition has nothing to do with the sort of men they have been. Stanley also believed that a new set of balls could even cure a man of criminality, which is a little bit ironic, given that he was acquiring these aftermarket testicles from the bodies of dead killers. In fact, Dr. Stanley's very first transplant case was an example of this delightful side effect.

The recipient was described as, A 25-year-old feeble-minded moron who possessed higher intelligence than an imbecile. Stanley's words. Stanley attributed this tragic state to an injury the man had suffered to his testes. What better cure then than a whole new pair? Seven weeks after receiving a set from a hanged murderer, the man showed improved alertness, was physically active, and had packed 15 pounds onto his formerly scrawny frame.

And, according to Dr. Stanley, there were other benefits as well. I believe he is rid permanently of his criminal tendencies. His mind was clear, he was in perfect health, and he convinced me that he would go straight thereafter. Today, some men get offended if you suggest their brains are in their pants, but I guess back then it was a different story.

Anywho, by 1937, Stanley had performed more than 6,000 of these transplants. Inmates at San Quentin were apparently waiting in line for the next execution, and their shot at the operation. He also refined his abdominal injection treatment, settling on a paste of ram's balls injected under the skin every three months. He claimed to have treated 400 patients in his private practice this way, both men and women, with 60% of those individuals responding favorably.

We did not make any claim that this procedure would increase longevity. That would be hard to establish. But, we believe that anyone who enjoys good health and vigor, and a general sense of well-being, and these are the common results of such transplantation, will outlive any person with opposite characteristics. Then came the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

The United States entered World War II, and Dr. Stanley took a leave of absence from San Quentin to serve as a doctor in the U.S. Navy. By the time he returned to San Quentin, things had very much changed. For starters, Nazi war crimes had taken the shine off eugenics and medical experimentation on human beings. The California State Department of Corrections now firmly opposed sterilization, and Stanley's view of San Quentin's inmates as a pool of readily available human lab rats?

Those days were over. Dr. Stanley stayed at the prison for just a few more years, but without the thrill of continuing his research with full dominion over the place, he made the decision to move on. He retired from San Quentin in 1951, and took up full-time private practice in Maroon County, California. In Dr. Stanley's 40 years at San Quentin, he completed 10,000 gland rejuvenation treatments.

Most were inmates, but there was the occasional fellow physician or civilian thrown in here and there. And for his final act, Dr. Stanley went back to sea, this time as a ship surgeon on a cruise line, and he liked it. Not just because the salt air was a tonic to the former Navy man, but because the job offered him the kind of all-encompassing authority that he'd grown very used to having at San Quentin.

Because a ship surgeon, you might think it an easy job, but it's far from that, because you have a passenger list of four or five hundred, and a crew of three or four hundred, and you're on your own out there. You have to do everything. I have delivered babies, taken care of coronaries, broken bones, cuts, everything that you would have to do in a general hospital service.

Remember Mrs. Romaine Stanley and her devoted manservant, the inmate named Lim Foon? I promised we'd come back to that. It's a tragedy that tuberculosis claimed Romaine's life in 1926. A grieving Dr. Stanley briefly left his post at San Quentin then, but returned in 1933. He eventually found love again and remarried to a woman named Bernice Holdhouse on New Year's Day, 1938.

And what about Lim Foon? Another tragedy. Though this is one Dr. Stanley helped set right. Lim Foon was only 18 when he was arrested and convicted for the gangland murder of a Chinese man in front of a poultry shop in Stockton, California. Lim was innocent of the crime. He was visiting a friend when it happened. Terrified, Lim escaped through the back door of the shop and hid inside a chicken coop.

That's where police found him. They interpreted his fear and shock as guilt. And off to San Quentin he went. Stanley had watched the young inmate care for Romaine, who'd managed to teach Lim how to read and write as she lay on what became her deathbed. Lim pleaded his innocence to Stanley, who became convinced that there had been a terrible mistake and a miscarriage of justice.

At his own expense, Dr. Stanley launched an investigation into Lim's case. It took some years, but Stanley was finally successful in persuading then governor of California, Fred Richardson, to issue a full pardon. And sure enough, another man, elderly and dying, ultimately confessed to the murder. Dr. Leo Stanley never elected to have a glandular transplant himself.

Not even the Ramsballs paste injections. He did opt for a vasectomy, believing, as many men did back then, that doing so would rejuvenate his flagging sexual potency. This was trendy in the day. Dr. Sigmund Freud did the same. I guess Freud's personal penis envy had more to do with his own much younger penis than it did his now discredited theory that female behavior was driven by a desperate yearning for a phallus of our very own.

What a giant weirdo he was. But back to Dr. Stanley, who died in 1976 at age 90. He never had children. His tarnished legacy is all he left to the world. But even that wound up helping to serve a higher purpose. Dr. Stanley's work at San Quentin was far from the only unethical experimentation on human beings in the United States.

There was the sheer horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Guatemala syphilis experiment, and the nightmarish experiments with mustard gas that the U.S. government performed on American soldiers. It was these and many others that prompted the United States Congress to pass the National Research Act in 1974, which established the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research.

Dr. Leo Stanley made no apologies for his work. He was proud of what he'd accomplished at San Quentin, and his contemporaries agreed. Even the well-known prison reformer, Austin McCormick, acknowledged that Stanley had transformed the institution into the finest of its kind in the country. Stanley's attention to how tuberculosis patients were best treated led to innovations that helped curb transmission among inmates, as well as promote their recovery.

He served his country during World War II. He served his community. Back in 1946, he ran for municipal office in Marin County and won. He probably liked dogs and held doors open for senior citizens. He just happened to believe that prison inmates made for excellent research subjects, and why in the world wouldn't he take advantage of that?

There are people today who would be in wholehearted agreement with him, because, as you know, human beings are powerfully attracted to the slipperiest of slopes when it comes to certain kinds of ethical choices, especially when those choices involve people who have been thoroughly othered by society, devalued, and dehumanized.

You know, like prison inmates. One last question to answer. The inmates who donated their testicles, did they have any say in the matter? They did, for the most part. Dr. Stanley's very first donor agreed to give his body to science after his execution. And time for a fun fact. If no next of kin stepped forward to claim the body of an executed man, and that, sadly, was a pretty common occurrence, that body would be given to science.

This accounts for Stanley's steady supply of still-warm testicles. As for the recipients, some were all in. And then there were others who, it's believed, granted consent just to get a break from the endless tedium of life behind bars. And it was well known at San Quentin that the food and accommodations in Stanley's hospital unit were far superior to what the inmates were accustomed to.

And if you also happen to walk out of there feeling like a new man, what's not to like about that? And you, my dude, you just might owe Dr. Stanley a little thank you for his wildly unethical and borderline Dr. Frankenstein prison experiments. His fascination with the glands and his unorthodox masculinity medicine helped open an entire research pathway into testosterone and its connection to male sexual potency.

And that ultimately led science to the famous little blue pill. Viagra. Next time on True Weird Stuff. Who doesn't love a good urban legend? Who doesn't love a good scary story? Most of them are make-believe. But every once in a while, that scary story, that boogeyman, that monster in the dark, is based 100% on a real person.

So who's the real person behind the legend of Charlie No-Face? Next time on True Weird Stuff. Max, as a man, was that super uncomfortable for you? Because apparently you don't even like to really talk about getting your testicles lopped off or transplanted or squished around or maneuvered. As much as I don't want to have those things happen to mine, listen to something that happened, you know, 100 years ago.

It doesn't seem to bother me too much. Oh, good, good, good. So I was, like, one of the things I'm confused by is how he was able to do these transplants, so many of them. He did 10,000 of these at San Quentin. And nobody died. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of infection. And I don't know what the inside of a man's scrotum looks like, but surely your balls aren't just free-floating around in that little velvet bag.

Aren't they connected to something? Yeah, Sherry, they have to be connected to the rest of your body. This is a conversation I didn't know I was going to be having today. Yeah, yeah, Sherry, they have to be connected. You know, they need the oxygen that comes through the blood and, you know. Yeah. Tell me you aren't amazed by this.

I am. At some point you did say that there were some horrific results. So I don't think that all of this was A-OK. And I got the feeling that maybe some of them may have improved somebody when they did this. I don't know how. I also wonder something. It seems like when you have other organs of the body that you are transplanting from one person to another, it seems like there's a rejection rate.

You see this with people with liver transplants and heart transplants, kidney transplants, that sometimes the organ is rejected. Wouldn't that happen as well? Exactly. And I need you to remember that in a pinch, he didn't think twice about giving you goat's balls. Right? Like not every man got human, not every inmate got human testicles.

The shocking thing about this is the success rate in terms of infection and mortality. Here's where it's less successful. Here's where it's less successful. The effects didn't really last. Like there would be an initial, like you heard the descriptions. Oh, this one walking taller and he gained 15 pounds and he feels like a million bucks.

But the effects weren't durable. Because if they were, we'd still be doing it today. We'd have commercials like the Jardians commercial where instead of my favorite Deanna Bomchicka in the yellow dress, you'd have some dude singing, I'm having a ball. It would be a really commonplace medical procedure. It was like the injections of the Rams ball paste under the skin of the abdomen.

This reminds me a bit of when we were doing the frontal lobotomy, the episode that we had that talked about that. Because for some people there seemed to be some, you know, help with this, that some people felt some immediate results and then they ended up deteriorating from there. So in a way, it sort of reminded me of that, that you're doing some real harebrained science here that is really, really iffy.

We always have to climb into the time machine. And in no way am I defending any of this. I mean, the guy was, first of all, the guy was like up to his eyeballs in passion for eugenics and who was not a fit human being. He would have sterilized entire family lines if he had been given free reign to do so. While Dr. Stanley is complicated because he was brilliant and he did a number of really good things in this world.

His innovations around how those inmates were treated in medical settings at San Quentin, what he did with cosmetic surgery, because he would say, for example, well, here's an inmate, you know, with a busted nose and a scar over his eye and he looks sinister. You would never say that today. You would never look at someone and go, you look like a criminal.

But he would say, you know what? This guy is going to have a hard time once he walks through the gates. No one's going to want to hire him. People are going to cross the other side of the street. And so he would fix their faces. And that, you know, that was a good thing. He got Lim Foon pardoned. The guy was innocent.

That was a good thing. Many, many good things. But at the end of the day, he was conducting unauthorized, unethical medical experimentation, medical experiments on the inmates at San Quentin. And I know because there are a lot of people that just think we're prisoners. Do anything you want to them. They shouldn't have broken the law.

You know, there's a thin line that you can't cross or we lose our humanity. Right. Yeah. I mean, I know why people are in prison. But at the same time, you're dealing with human beings. You're not dealing with livestock. You're not dealing with animals. Some people are psychopaths and sociopaths and everything in between.

Some of them are bad people. But a lot of them are not. They are victims of the circumstances that they grew up in. They are people who perhaps through substance abuse have made poor choices in their lives. I mean, so there's a lot of people whose lives really are salvageable. Just saying because somebody is a convicted felon and they're in prison and we can do whatever we want to.

It's just it's horrifying to me because. And look at Lim Foon, Max. He was completely innocent of any wrongdoing. I mean. And he was in San Quentin. You know, it seems like they were doing a lot of executing by back then. You know, you and they were executing and they were being convicted on evidence today that we would consider laughable.

Because today we're going, where's the DNA? Where's you know, where's the fingerprint evidence? Where's this or that? And they were doing a lot of stuff by eyewitness accounts back then. And that has been proven to be a totally unreliable way to convict people. I mean, many times. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Like you can make.

I'm so, you know, I guess somebody debunker. I have so many debunker conversations. Hey, well, the inmates said he wanted them. So, you know, he got them. And what's the. OK, sure. Yeah. The inmate wanted the new testicles and he got the testicles and everybody lived happily ever after. But you can't. This is what I mean when I say like humans love a slippery slope.

Either these people are human beings or they're laboratory animals, but they can't be both. And the thing about Dr. Leo Stanley and we could have done. I could have left all of his testicle transplants aside and we could have just talked about the eugenics and forced sterilization. Many, many of the men who came through San Quentin during his tenure left sterilized.

And many of the women, too. People don't realize that in the early days, San Quentin was a coed institution. In fact, when Dr. Stanley first got to San Quentin, he was he wanted the building that housed female inmates. He wanted that whole building to be the medical unit. And the state of California and the warden was like, listen up.

That is not going to happen. Look at all these inmates. Like where are all these women going to go? Well, there was this huge movement to segregate San Quentin and make it just a male penitentiary. And so some point at some point in Dr. Stanley's tenure, that happened. And all of the female inmates were moved to a separate female only prison setting.

And then Dr. Stanley had their building for his medical experimentation. But the thing was, any number of women were also forced sterilized by the state of California. And Stanley felt that he could tell by looking at you whether or not you were fit to breed. Well, that's kind of like being able to identify guilty people just by looking at them.

I'm sorry. I'm just kidding on that. We can't have that. No, we can't have that kind of thing. What's most shocking is that the laws guiding this were not changed until about 45, 50 years ago. The first sterilizations ended, what, 45 years ago? And the law concerning some of these kinds of experimental surgeries he was doing was 50 years ago.

1974, I think, is what it said. So that's really not all that long ago that we finally got around to saying, you know, we might want to do some laws about this to prevent this from happening again. That's shocking to me. Well, and I'm not trying to pick on California because California is one of many, many, many states where people were forcibly sterilized against their will.

In fact, in the state where you and I live, forced sterilizations continued, I believe, up through the 1980s, even after the National Research Act was passed. And the decision about who would receive these forced sterilizations, it was kind of a little bit arbitrary, you know, made by committees. And this person is, I mean, you heard the language that was used back then, feebleminded, moronic, and imbecile.

Those words today, like moron is slang, right? But there was once upon a time a clinical definition for moron, a clinical definition for imbecile. You know, they would measure your head and the shape of your head and the distance between your eyes and come up with these totally cock-a-doodle-doo, jacked-up theories about how you were genetically unfit.

But they would, and what they would do is they would warehouse people all together. They would do substance abuse people, autistic people, people with emotional problems, people with mental problems. They would warehouse them all in the same place. They just would kind of go, yeah, we're just going to kind of throw you in here in these hospitals.

And then terrible things happened. And those people, so if you've never listened to the True Weird Stuff episode called Subproject 68, I think you might enjoy that one because that is unethical, illegal experimentation on human beings paid for and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency at a hospital for behavioral health in Montreal, Canada.

And what was done to those people, Max, is that not among the most horrific things you've ever encountered? It is one of the most haunting episodes because when you hear the man who the experiments were done on, and he apparently had no say in this. They were done on him as a teenager. He talked about how it changed his personality and changed him as a person and the things that it did to him.

It is horrifying. It is haunting. If you haven't listened to that episode, please do listen to it. Or if you listen to it, listen to it again. It is one of the most haunting episodes that we've done. It's horrific, and that wasn't a long time ago. That's recent. That was part of the, like, MKUltra, the CIA program MKUltra, which you think is a bunch of tinfoil hat stuff on the artist formerly known as Twitter.

No, it's real and embedded inside MKUltra. I want to say there were 147 sub-projects inside MKUltra, and we did an episode on sub-project 68 because what was done to these human beings was the equivalent or maybe worse than an ice pick lobotomy in some ways. So, you know, we have to, like, it's kind of like, oh, haha, funny, I'm getting a new set of balls, right?

There's a little bit of, like, a, you know, comedic thing in the guy, like, transplanting pony balls into people and mashing things up. Like, you get, you know, you laugh a little bit. But what that really was about was this man feeling that the inmates under his care did not have the same humanity or human rights that free people did.

And therefore, they were up for grabs. Like, yikes. Now, let's talk a little bit about what he really did land on. So, you know, back then, people were just starting to go, we think there are these things inside the human body called hormones. So this was new and very kind of unproven, experimental. Like, it was the, you know, the early days of endocrinology.

And Dr. Stanley, in a very brute force, simplistic barnyard kind of way, hit on testosterone as being really critical to well-being and stamina and vitality and energy and sexual potency. So he was, and yeah, he was right. He was right that the scrotum was, you know, central to a man's health and identity. Didn't necessarily understand all the ways that that was true.

But he understood what the what was. And, you know, it became just a very simplistic approach. Like, if the scrotum is very central to your health and identity, maybe you need a new set of testicles because yours are worn out. The problem with this is you mix in some murky ethics and it's horrifying. I mean, you take somebody who is obviously a very smart person, but if you have a smart person who has no ethics, he can do far more damage than somebody who is not smart and has no ethics.

I mean, that's the that's the crux of it. Like we have to make decisions as a civilization about what is and is not going to be acceptable. Yes, we want to move. You know, knowledge forward and we want to make leaps in medicine and science. But not at the expense of our humanity, right? Like we need to go maybe a little bit lower than that.

And the thing about Dr. Stanley, so he died in 1976 at age 90. You know, he skated on all of it. He just did. He skated on all of it. He died just two years after the laws on biomedical and behavioral research on human subjects were put into place. And the work that he had done had been on inmates for the most part. And so he just bopped along like, well, all right, I guess I'm in the Navy now.

Oh, I guess I'm back at the prison. Oh, I guess I'm a cruise ship doctor. Oh, I'm in my grave without ever really feeling the heat. Of any of it, which is rare, and I guess for him, lucky, right? So there were some other sketchy things that happened with his testicle transplants. Word got out and he had a private practice as well, right?

So word got out that Dr. Stanley could really give a man back his get up and go. And what happened next? Men with money won it in on this miracle cure. But they didn't want goats balls and they didn't want just any testicles. They wanted the testicles of a violent murderer who was being executed. They wanted those balls.

So there's an there was an incident. A widow whose husband had been convicted and sent to San Quentin received a letter offering her like $10,000 for her husband's testicles when he was hanged. And she turned it down because she said as much as that would have helped me take care of my children. How could I be a part of that?

Like, how could I sell a piece of my husband like that? Finally, somebody has some ethics. Well, there's one ethical person, right? But think of there were a lot of there were there was a lot of this because, you know, it's like anything else, right? If you have money, what are you going to do? Look at all these like really wealthy and powerful celebrities who do like that.

I forget what it's called, but they like spin their plasmid inject the vampire. Inject it back in their faces and hyperbaric chambers and God knows what else and what all right. So not only did we have Stanley experimenting on human beings, but we had like with a wink and a nod selling dead people testicles out the back window to rich guys.

Come on. And there and again, I know there are people who are like, and your point, like, what's the problem? Like, what do you care? They're prisoners. They're killers. They're this or that. I mean, that that do human beings, you know, I mean, I know some of them, like I said before, I know some of them are really bad.

But by and large, they are human beings who do not deserve to be treated this way. And we've talked about cruel and unusual punishment in this country. I mean, we cannot we cannot punish that way. We cannot. No. And I guess the only defense you can make of Dr. Stanley is that he wasn't injecting these men with syphilis.

He wasn't injecting these men with mercury. He wasn't forcibly giving making sure they got tuberculosis so he could study their lungs. No, he wasn't doing any of that. He was offering them a new lease on life with a new set of balls. And I think that's him. That's part of why he skated, because as unethical as it was.

And even the state of California, when he came back from serving in World War Two, was like, yeah, party's over. Thanks to the Nazis. We're just not going to be doing this anymore. Even the state of California welcomed him back to San Quentin. They just made you know, they took his toys away. But then he was able to leave and have a second and third and fourth chapter after that without any real judgment or scrutiny.

And I think that's because what he was doing was not what happened at the ski. Right. It was not what happened with the Guadalmala syphilis experiments. He was like, well, here's some balls. Here's here's murderers for you. And I got some goat balls for you. And, you know, maybe we'll have some paste for your brother.

Like whatever. It doesn't make it OK. It just doesn't make it OK. And that's why we have to have that's why we have to have laws against such things. Sure. And today men can get testosterone therapy. Yeah. So you don't need. So if you're a guy listening to this and you're gone, I don't know, girl. I mean, I'm not for nothing, but I'm tired and I don't have to get up to go.

I used to have my brother. Listen to me. You do not need to hunt down murder or transplant testicles. You can get testosterone therapy. I think you can even get it as like a gel and put it on your skin or you don't need to go through this. Sherry, can you assure me that you're not going to do any further episodes about sharp objects near testicles anytime soon?

No time soon. I mean, I can't say I can't say forever, but no time soon. And I and I want to also end by pointing out that, yeah, this guy, this guy is so tricky because he's bad. He's good. He's bad. He's complicated. We like this. He's complicated. He's complicated. But it really was. Dr. Stanley did not discover Viagra.

No, but his work around the endocrinology of testosterone was part of, you know, forging the path that led us for better or worse to drugs like Viagra and Cialis and and all of that. And and those drugs have done a lot of people a lot of good. So if I were y'all, you know, like sweet baby Jesus and a cast iron jockstrap, I'd be careful with those things.

Because apparently they're just flopping around loose inside, you know, anybody can scoop them out. And that's it for this episode of True Weird Stuff. We want to send out our greatest thanks and a big shout out to Robert Tansy, who voiced Dr. Leo Stanley. And I will tell you that when I texted him because I had been looking to write a part for him in a true weird episode.

So let me tell you, let me pull up his text. When I said, hey, would you like to play Dr. Leo Stanley? And he was this doctor at San Quentin and he's famous for doing testicle transplants. You know, convicted murderers who've just been executed, but also sometimes goats and rams. He replied back, ha, ha, ha. Mine are shrinking and trying to hide after reading this.

Sure, I would love to give it a go. So thank you, Robert Tansy. Thank you for listening to True Weird Stuff. Do not miss next week's episode. It takes you inside the urban legend of Charlie No Face. This is one of the only urban legends in America that is entirely, magnificently, spectacularly true and based on a true, real person.

And the true, real person behind Charlie No Face is not at all what you're going to be expecting. Can't wait for you to hear the story. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening. And Max, you can go ahead and uncross your legs now. Thank you. And by the way, special thanks to Robert Tansy. He was the voice of Dr. Stanley in this episode.

And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner, and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com, for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content.

Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2024, Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.