Gland Larceny
By: Dale M. Brumfield
Tags: Chicago, Organ Harvesting, American Grotesk, True Crime, Unsolved Mysteries

Gland Larceny

Testicle theft a real problem in 1922 Chicago

Joseph Wozniak, America’s first victim of live organ harvesting.

THE STORY EXPLODED NATIONWIDE over the Associated Press wire service on October 14 and 15, 1922. A married, 34-year-old “husky” World War I veteran and marginally employed Wisconsin beet farmer living in Chicago named Joseph Wozniak reported to police that he and a friend went to a Chicago bar, where they drank heavily with four other men. Later, as Wozniak explained to a physician named Dr. Sampelinski, the four men threw a bag over his head, forced him into a car and chloroformed him. He woke up on a sidewalk under a viaduct near 17th Street.

Then, he discovered that one or both of his testicles were missing.

“When I came to, my mind was befuddled,” Wozniak told police. “I did not know I had been operated on. I thought I had a hangover. I had the taste of ether or chloroform in my mouth. 1 felt intense pain and when I got home I called Dr. Sampelinski.”

According to the AP story, Wozniak was a target of “gland theft,” and the first victim of illegal organ harvesting in the United States.

Rejuvenation

An article titled “Rejuvenation by Testicular Transplantation and Occlusion of The Seminal Ducts” that appeared in the July 1922 Journal of the American Medical Association was taken quite seriously by someone, as the gland thefts of not just Wozniak but two others began just a few months later.

As Wozniak rested at home after his release from the hospital, Dr. Sampelinski told the AP that apparently his operation “was the work of an expert surgeon who may have been retained by some wealthy and aged patient with a desire for rejuvenation.” According to the doctor, since the wealthy person was unable to purchase a “gland” on the open market, he was forced to kidnapping to “accomplish his ends.”

It was reported that Wozniak’s wife initially did not believe his kidnapping story, in that her husband had been out of work and needed money. Wozniak, however, denied he sold his testicle just to make a quick buck.

Gland allusion

Experiments in endocrinology, and especially in the effects of male rejuvenation, trace back to 1914 when a Chicago urologist and virulent racist named Frank Lydston sewed a cadaver’s testicle inside his own scrotum. Lydston subsequently wrote that the surgery quickly produced “a marked exhilaration and buoyancy of spirits” but added it did not help his chronic constipation. Lydston’s experiments gained little traction in the medical community, mostly due to his repugnant embrace of eugenics, including the involuntary castration of Black men, and the belief that transplanted testicles would cure homosexuality. Lydston later had to remove the foreign testicle because it “went bad.”

Gland specialist Dr. Victor Lespinasse described Wozniak’s impromptu 1922 operation as the degenerate but skilled work of a lunatic. “There are many men who have a perversion for gland operations,” he told the AP reporter. “They are not doctors but they have studied the process until they know more about it than 98 percent of the physicians.”

Lespinasse was no amateur in the field of testicular transplants. He first successfully implanted a donor’s testicle in a 38-year-old man who had lost both of his own. It was also Lespinasse who in June 1922 reportedly transplanted a monkey testicle into the scrotum of Harold McCormick, the uber-wealthy industrialist, and son of reaper inventor Cyrus McCormick.

When McCormick arrived in Paris two months after the operation to marry his fiancé, Walska, he was described by a reporter as “a younger, gayer, more youthful, apparently indeed rejuvenated Harold McCormick.”

More victims

After Wozniak’s story became public, two more emboldened casualties came forward. One, a city electrician named Harry Johnson (seriously, his real name), claimed he passed out as he tried to find his way home after a day-long bender. “In the morning, he was found in a hallway, his masculinity gone,” the Chicago Tribune reported. He initially refused to come forward out of fear of negative notoriety.

The third victim to speak out was a 21-year-old cab driver named Charles Ream. He claimed he was kidnapped after leaving a streetcar before being chloroformed and castrated. In a bizarre twist, Ream accused infamous convicted thrill killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb of taking his manhood, but a civil court case in 1924 resulted in a hung jury, defeating his quest for a $100,000 settlement. A surgeon told The New York Times that Ream’s surgery was particularly dicey and that he would have died if it wasn’t for his expert bandaging. “The operation was evidently performed by someone who knew what he was about,” the doctor testified in a statement that made the jury question the roles of Leopold and Loeb in the crime, leading to their exoneration for this crime.

Centralia Courier, 10–20–1922.

When a North Chicago man named John Powell reported that two men attempted to drug and castrate him, police feared an epidemic of gland robberies that recalled Edinburgh, Scotland’s “Burking epidemic” of the nineteenth century, when random citizens, under William Burke, were strangled by gangs to supply bodies for the medical school dissecting labs. Powell admitted to police several months later that he was not a potential victim of gland theft at all, but that he had accidentally sat on a hay knife, inflicting his injury.

A frustrated Dr. Hugh McKenchnie of the Chicago Medical Society told the AP that Police Captain Coughlin would charge any parties guilty of “gland banditry” with mayhem, punishable with a sentence of one to 14 years in the penitentiary. As Chicago’s young male population started getting a little more apprehensive, however, Illinois Representative Thomas O’Grady proposed making gland theft a capital crime punishable by death, promising to file the bill at the January 1923 session. The bill, if even filed, went nowhere.

A lead … maybe

Capt. Coughlin meanwhile claimed that his Chief of Detectives, Hodges, had been supplied the name of an elderly millionaire who was engaged to a 22-year-old woman who just happened to be in Chicago for a “rejuvenation” surgery the day after Ream had been kidnapped, chloroformed and castrated. Hodges claimed that the millionaire, a St. Louis confectionary president named Henry Baurichter, may have hired a clever surgeon, paying him $100,000 in advance to acquire the needed glands and transplant them.

But Baurichter’s surgeon, Dr. Lespinasse, angrily disputed the rumor that he would resort to stolen testicles, and besides, Lespinasse claimed that Baurichter — who most likely did not appreciate having his delicate surgery dragged through the press — did not have a transplantation at all.

The stories — some less plausible than others — kept coming. On October 18, 1923, 19-year-old Anthony Tonsi was allegedly assaulted by three men supposedly wearing white lab coats who told him “we need a gland.” Tonsi claimed he shouted and the men ran off. Then, on November 25, the body of a University of Chicago student, Freeman Tracy, was found on the sidewalk with a fatal high-caliber bullet wound in his temple. Police speculated that he was the victim of a botched gland theft, then shot and pushed from a moving car.

Almost a year after Ream reported his testicles missing, police arrested his cousin, Earl English, a student at the University of Chicago, and charged him with mayhem. The charges did not stick, however, and English was let go.

Chicago Tribune, 11–23–1923.

Incredibly, no one was ever convicted or even arrested in the Chicago testicle thefts, and the entire affair remains an unsolved mystery. And, in a sad and unfortunate footnote, Joseph Wozniak — the first American victim of organ harvesting — died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home on Fay Street in Chicago on November 24, 1926. A relative claimed that he never got over what had happened to him.

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