Rejuvenation research and the American Medical Association in the early twentieth century: Paradigms in conflict

'Rejuvenation' research was a subfield of endocrinology which received a great deal of negative press claiming that it was a specious search for renewed youth. This study examines the rejuvenators' approach to sex hormones and the problem of aging, and the progress of this idea in the American medical community in the 1920s and 1930s. Within the professional medical structure of the time, the idea was dismissed or condemned. As a result, 'rejuvenation' became synonymous with quackery. Such condemnation was far more prevalent in the USA than in Europe because of the campaign led by the American Medical Association.;This study investigates the reasons why rejuvenators did not become a unified paradigm group, why rejuvenation research did not become a scientific specialty in the United States, and why the work of the rejuvenators could not be integrated into the mainstream of American medicine. A study of original sources demonstrates that many 'rejuvenators' were as legitimate, both in terms of credentials, position, and clinical procedures, as their detractors. Their work was an integral part of the emerging disciplines of endocrinology and cell-therapy, but it was not until the chemists synthesized sex hormones that hormone therapy escaped its animal origins and became 'scientific' and acceptable.;The multi-faceted analysis carried out in this study reveals a complex interplay of factors which influenced the fate of rejuvenation research in the USA: the professionalization of medicine, the dramatic increase in the power of the AMA, the influence of JAMA, the notoriety of a few undoubted quacks, and the concurrent rise of endocrinology.;This study concludes that much legitimate research concerning sex hormones and the problem of aging was labeled 'rejuvenation' and condemned without investigation. It further suggests that the rejuvenators represented an alternative medical paradigm that conflicted with the prevailing disease model of medicine, and that the American medical establishment, in rejecting that research, was actually defending the prevailing medical paradigm.