Dr Giles Skey Brindley, FRCP, FRS, knows how to stand proud. At a 1983 Urodynamics Society lecture in Las Vegas, he demonstrated – with panache – that he could inject drugs into his penis and thereby cause an erection.
Brindley had developed the first effective treatment for what was then called “impotence” and today goes by the stiffer euphemism “erectile dysfunction”. His appearance in Las Vegas ensured that the discovery would not go unnoticed.
Two decades later, Laurence Klotz, a University of Toronto urologist, wrote a firsthand account of his experience at that meeting. How (Not) to Communicate New Scientific Information: A Memoir of the Famous Brindley Lecture, graces the November 2005 issue of the urological journal BJU International.
Klotz reports: “[Brindley] indicated that, in his view, no normal person would find the experience of giving a lecture to a large audience to be erotically stimulating or erection-inducing. He had, he said, therefore injected himself with papaverine in his hotel room before coming to give the lecture, and deliberately wore loose clothes to make it possible to exhibit the results…
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.