On lust and rage - prostate cancer, vasectomy and virility in the aging male.

摘要

The Spur. You think it horrible that lust and rage. Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song? W.B. Yeats (1865-1939). Yeats (Figure 1) wrote this piece in 1938 as a response to allegations that he was behaving inappropriately for a man of his seniority and standing. He was 73, and four years earlier had undergone 'Steinach's rejuvenation operation'; essentially a vasectomy. The effect for the poet was sufficiently dramatic that he described it as a 'second puberty'. The resulting lust and rage 'convulsed his life and changed his work beyond all recognition' [1].