Carter's Pill; & Monkey Glands

[Dennis R. Preston]

Once? What you mean once? I still say it more'n Carter's got LIttle
Liver PIlls.

dInIs (who admits his grad students find it "quaint")

>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.

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736