Carter's Pill; & Monkey Glands

[George Thompson]

There was once an expression "to have more of [whatever] than Carter has
pills".  I remember seeing Carter's Little Liver Pills when I was a kid,
and they were truly little.  The contents of even a small bottle would
have seemed beyond numbering.

As regards the drink "monkey glands": there were quack doctors in the
1920s and 1930s who claimed to rejuvenate impotent men by implanting
monkey glands or goat glands (i.e., testicles) in their bodies.  Check
Google under "monkey glands potency" for some interesting notes, one of
which compares the indecent drink-name "monkey glands" with current
drink names like "screaming orgasm".  A further Google search under
"monkey glands yeats" will turn up the information that in the 1930s, a
few years before his death, Yeats had a monkey glands implant.  His most
recent biographer mundanely says that Yats had merely had a vasectomy in
the hopes of restoring his virility, but I suspect the learned author is
being circumspect.  At the least, the idea that Yeats had had this
operation was a piece of English Dept. folklore in the mid 1960s.

I also recall a passage in one of Jonathan Latimer's detective novels of
the 1940s: a female character says to her elderly lover words to the
effect "you're pretty good, but you don't have goat glands".  This
passage stuck in my mind at the time because I didn't understand it.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African
Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.