Harry Benjamin and the birth of transgender medicine
Alison Li · 2023
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Description
Alison Li profiles the doctor who founded transgender medicine in this two thousand twenty-three history article. Harry Benjamin, who lived from eighteen eighty-five to nineteen eighty-six, wrote the landmark nineteen sixty-six book The Transsexual Phenomenon. He gave the first clinical account of the condition then called transsexualism and urged kind treatment when few doctors would. He came to it late: until his sixties his New York practice served aging opera singers, film stars, and millionaires in geriatrics.
Born in Berlin and stranded in the United States by the First World War, Benjamin grew drawn to the endocrine glands. Hormone science then offered little beyond thyroid extracts and adrenaline, yet fans pictured hormones ruling sex, growth, aging, and even crime. In the nineteen twenties he backed the Steinach operation, a procedure meant to slow aging. That pull to hormones became the thread leading to his clinical work.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Alison Li |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2023 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 9 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |