Medicine: Hormone Massage

When ointment containing male sex hormones is rubbed into the comb of a capon, the listless, bedraggled cock gradually turns into a lusty, strutting rooster. Reason; the hormones are absorbed into his bloodstream. When Dr. George L. Foss of the Royal Infirmary at Bristol, England learned that this direct application of hormones to a capon's comb is 200 times more effective than injections, he decided last summer to try it on impotent men.

He mixed testosterone propionate (synthetic male hormone) into a bland ointment, gave two patients tubes of the ointment, asked them to squeeze out an inch (containing about 20 milligrams of hormone) and massage it into their thighs and abdomens every night. Within a month the flabby men grew hairier, more muscular, even "pugnacious." When they used the cream faithfully they were able to practice normal sexual relations. A third patient, a boy of 18 whose voice had not yet changed, rubbed the ointment into the skin over his Adam's apple twice daily for a month until "his voice became very deep and remained so."

Hormone massage, concluded Dr. Foss in The Lancet last week, "is the simplest method of androgen [male hormone] therapy . . . is most acceptable to the patient who desires a maintenance dosage."