These days, the urge to stay young forever  takes the form of influencers hawking their own line of unregulated supplements and uberrich biohackers getting  plasma transfusions from teenagers.

But the search for immortality  is far from a modern one. And throughout history, humans have come up with some pretty  weird ideas for how to evade death.

From drinking stuff that will  actually kill you faster, to monkey testicle implants, here are five weird ways that  people tried to live forever. [intro jingle] Here’s something you shouldn’t  ever do: Drink mercury. Mercury is a super dense, silvery metal that doesn’t turn solid unless it’s below, like, -39 degrees Celsius. You can find it in old school dental  fillings, fluorescent lighting, and chem lab thermometers which I definitely didn’t break too  many of and pretend it never happened.

But it’s not super useful  if you want to stay alive. Just ask Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang. He’s the guy who first unified  China, back in 221 BCE.

He also initiated the building of the Great Wall, so dude’s got a pretty impressive resumé. But there was one accomplishment  that he always found out of reach: Immortality. Some of his obsession may have stemmed from his surviving multiple  assassination attempts.

Whatever his motive, Qin Shi Huang  became very paranoid about death. But his efforts to stay  alive were counterproductive. Historians widely agree that  the emperor sought elixirs hat would make him immortal, and he ultimately died  consuming one full of mercury.

Now, mercury has a pretty  long history of medicinal use, especially across early Asia. These days, though, we know a lot more  about what mercury does inside your body. And it’s not pretty.

I should clarify here that I’m talking  specifically about methylmercury, which infamously accumulates in seafood. It’s highly toxic, and the World  Health Organization considers it a major public health concern. It’s different from ethylmercury, which breaks down way faster in  your body and doesn’t accumulate, making it useful to prevent the growth  of germs in stuff like vaccines.

But methylmercury is a neurotoxin.  It’s bad for your nervous system… and your digestive and immune systems. Also your lungs, kidneys, skin, and eyes.   It accumulates inside of you,  impairing your mental functioning. And, if you’re young, your  neurological development.

Above all, it can kill you. So needless to say, Qin Shi Huang  did not achieve immortality, but his relationship with mercury  didn’t end with his death.   According to historian Sima Qian,  who chronicled the emperor’s life, he was buried inside a chamber decorated with liquid mercury rivers and lakes, approximating the geography of China. Scientists estimate there could have been  at least 100 tons of the stuff to start, but over time, it leaked out both through  cracks in the ground and just by evaporating, like liquids tend to do.

Studies have shown elevated  atmospheric mercury levels near Qin Shi Huang’s tomb, which has never been opened… because, well, we’re still trying  to figure out a safe way to do that. Qin Shi Huang and his deadly  search for immortality isn’t a historical anomaly, of course. Move just one step leftwards  on the periodic table, and you’ll go from mercury to gold.

And we’ll take several steps  across both space and time to meet French courtier Diane de Poitiers. She was Henry II’s mistress in  the early-to-mid 16th century, and basically queen of France in all but name. And de Poitiers, who was  20 years older than Henry, was known to have regularly  consumed gold to stay young.

Now, this might not sound alarming  if you’re used to edible gold. That’s chemically inert, so it’s okay according to U. S.

Food  and Drug Administration standards. But that’s not what she was swallowing. She wasn’t even eating chunks  of plain metallic gold.

She was drinking her own toxic  mixture called “Aurum potabile” . This “drinkable gold” could  be made a few different ways, including distilling alcohol  solutions with sulfuric acid, producing diethyl ether. That then got mixed with  the compound gold chloride, which is toxic.

If swallowed, it can damage  your blood, liver, and kidneys. This combo produced a gold-colored  layer at the top of the liquid, which some considered drinkable gold. De Poitiers died in 1566, at the age of 66.

Centuries later…by which I mean 2009… a study published in the  British Medical Journal revealed that scientists had found elevated levels of gold in a preserved sample of her hair. They concluded that all that drinkable gold might have been what ultimately killed her. But it wasn’t just royalty with a  questionable knowledge of science that fell prey to thinking they’d  found the solution to living forever.

Even the so-called Father of the  Scientific Method, Francis Bacon, had some pretty… oily ideas. Now, Bacon was a sickly guy , but he still believed people  had a duty to live longer… not just for the hell of it, but so  that they could pursue knowledge. Of course, in the 17th century, those kinds of aspirations could  lead you to some weird conclusions, even if you were a respected  philosopher and scientist.

See, Bacon believed both animate  and inanimate bodies contained   different kinds of air quotes] “spirits.” He thought those came in different types, controlling everything from  bodily functions to sensations. Even more extreme than that, Bacon declared spirits could be like a, quote, “gentle flame” that conspire  with the air to…still quoting… “destroy the whole Fabrick of the Body”. Bacon figured that a life hack for living longer   came down to calming and  catering to those spirits.

And he had a lot of ideas  about how best to do that. Some of this will sound a bit familiar. It’s no mercury, but Bacon did think items  like dissolved pearls or gems could be injected into the  bloodstream to help extend your life.

That’s in addition to plenty of other weird stuff, like having some rhubarb soaked in  white wine and beer for half an hour, and consuming that once every six or seven days. Which sounds downright pleasant for  a man who had potassium nitrate… a critical ingredient in old school gunpowder… every morning in his broth. But Francis Bacon was also  super fixated on moisture.

Specifically, he thought it would be  really bad if it escaped your body. I also hate dry skin, so I get it. But Bacon was pretty intense about it.

He thought generously slathering  yourself in oils, ointments, and pomades was the way to go if you  wanted a shot at immortality. See, Bacon believed that oil could  be effective in tending to spirits, because for whatever reason, he  figured it wouldn’t irritate them. And he had some scientific reasoning here.

Bacon made a lot of observations about oil, like how it could preserve bodies, or soften things that had become hard, like parchment or leather. And he likened oil filling  up pores to varnish on wood. In one text, he cited an example of  a guy who allegedly lived to be 300, and noted that the supposed three-times-over  centenarian claimed to have done so, quote “by oil without and honey within.” Which sounds better than  beer-soaked rhubarb, I guess.

Bacon also cited Hippocrates’ advice that people  slather their clothes with oil in the summer, which our dude decided was because  spirits exhale the most in the summer, and clogging your pores with oil was the only way to keep the spirits from running away. Don’t think you were avoiding  oil in the winter, though. Bacon also thought a good dash of fatty goodness during the colder months would  be healthy and keep out the cold.

The Father of the Scientific Method  wasn’t totally off his rocker. Oil actually can be great for you,  as anyone with dry skin can attest. But if you slather yourself in it every day you’re more likely to have greasy skin  and pimples than you are to live forever.

While people throughout history have  thought the secret to living forever was hiding in someone else’s blood, not every weird story you’ve heard is true. Vampires are not real, despite of the what Baludr's Gate 3 and the 2,311  pieces of fanfic tagged “AstarionReader” on AO3 right now have to say about it Take Hungarian countess  Elizabeth Báthory, for example. She was born in 1560 to a powerful family who  controlled the historic region of Transylvania.

After her husband died, rumors started to circle. Bloody rumors. Specifically, she was accused of  murdering more than 600 peasant girls and bathing in their blood, believing it would keep her youthful.

Some modern feminist scholars disagree  and say Báthory, a powerful woman, was framed for financial reasons. But she’s not alone. In 1492, Pope  Innocent VIII was deathly ill.

To save his life, a physician allegedly  drained the blood of three “youths” and administered a blood transfusion. But it was all in vain. Innocent  died, and so did all the youths.

Or at least that’s how the story goes. This particular tale typically  emphasizes that the physician was Jewish, and a number of historians are pretty  convinced it’s an antisemitic whopper. Even so, blood really is a common fixation for people trying to avoid death.

Let’s start with Robert Boyle, a guy whose name you probably  learned in chemistry class. Boyle became fascinated by blood  transfusion while analyzing a gruesome, fatal attempt involving dogs. Today, we know that blood transfusion  is critical and life-saving.

But back in Boyle’s day, people  really didn’t know much about it. Boyle was an early pioneer in the field… but not always in ways that are super above board. For one thing, he oversaw a blood  transfusion between a sheep and a human, leading to years of public mockery.

Then there was his fruitless  search for the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance that alchemists believed  could help reveal an “elixir of life.” Boyle died in 1691, but human  fascination with blood would live on. Alexander Bogdanov, a Soviet  physician born in 1873, truly helped pioneer blood transfusion. He founded the Institute for  Blood Transfusion in Russia, now called the National Medical  Research Centre for Hematology.

He also believed humans had an obligation  to cure death and help the sick, sparking an interest in rejuvenation,  or reversing the process of aging. That interest would prove  fatal: Bogdanov died in 1928 after a blood transfusion to a critically  ill student, who wound up surviving. Scientists obviously got a lot better at  matching blood donors with recipients, though, so the dream of curing old age with  young blood persists to this day.

Like maybe you’ve heard of Bryan Johnson,  the tech guy trying to live forever. In 2023, at the age of 45, he engaged in an unregulated  blood plasma transfusion with both his 70-year-old  father and 17-year-old son. Both Johnson and his son had about  a liter of their blood removed… that’s like a fifth of what’s  inside a typical person… and then the blood was spun around in a centrifuge to separate out the blood’s plasma  from all the red blood cells and other important bits which  another body might reject.

Johnson’s father received a  transfusion of Johnson’s plasma, while Johnson himself got his  son’s. The son, in turn, got zilch. Please note that the FDA does  not recommend doing this.

And Johnson himself admitted he didn’t wind up seeing any  benefits from the procedure. But I do have to acknowledge  that there is some evidence that ingredients in young  blood can help aging organs. A lot of that science relies  on mice, though, not humans.

And it’s still pretty early research. So in the meantime, maybe just donate your blood to keep  other people from dying if you can? And avoid putting insufficiently  tested concoctions inside of you.

Which leads me to testicles. If you heard the name Charles-Édouard  Brown-Séquard prior to 1889, it was probably because he  was one of the first people to work out the physiology of the spinal cord. Pretty impressive!

But after 1889, it may have been because of his  foray into some questionable self-experimentation. Specifically, he injected himself with fluid   from the testicles of freshly  killed dogs and guinea pigs. Ten times.

Which yes, on the one hand  is good scientific practice. But on the other, that’s 10  more times than he should have. Brown-Séquard believed this procedure  would restore strength and stamina, and he did the proper thing and presented  his results to France’s Biological Society.

According to one source, he made no claim that he’d found the  latest version of the fountain of youth. Merely that something inside testicles might  have a role to play beyond reproduction, and other researchers should  try to replicate his findings. He died a few years later, a  week shy of his 77th birthday, but his work did generate a lot of  interest in sex hormone research.

Which leads us to Serge Voronoff, born in 1866, who observed eunuchs in Egypt  who seemed to age quickly. From there, he jumped to the bold  conclusion that testicular transplants could help reverse a lot of  health problems. Including aging.

And Voronoff was an equal opportunist: He did his experiments on people and animals, using the testicles of  executed prisoners at first, before turning to more readily available monkeys. Through xenotransplantations, or transplanting  live cells from one species to another, Voronoff grafted slices of baboon  testicles onto thousands of aging men, relying on his own farm to ensure  a steady supply of animals. A 1928 New York Times article reported that Voronoff believed gland-grafting  could elongate human life for upwards of 150 years.

But as you might suspect, none  of Voronoff’s subjects ever lived even close to that long. That didn’t stop people from thinking  he was onto something, though. Which takes us to Eugen Steinach, an Austrian physiologist who shaped  the early field of endocrinology.

He figured out a lot about how sex hormones work, but his methods were pretty questionable. And following World War I, he attempted to cure homosexuality  via testicle transplantation. Eventually, he pioneered the “Steinach operation,” a half-unilateral vasectomy.

Because the procedure was not a full vasectomy, it left some sperm behind, meant to increase sexual  potency and restore youth. Steinach believed the remaining  testis would go into overdrive. The operation had some high-profile proponents, including the Irish poet and Nobel  laureate William Butler Yeats, who had one when he was 69.

He said it sparked a “second puberty”,  although he did die about 5 years later. Steinach, meanwhile, missed out on the  Nobel prize a whopping seven times. Now, all these researchers did  help us learn a lot about bodies.

But their work is also part of an  ongoing trend we still see today. We live in a world of alpha male influencers who are very fixated on masculinity and virility, telling you to do things like  eating raw cow testicles. And while I will not argue that restaurants have to remove their Rocky  Mountain Oysters from the menu, I will say that just like drinking mercury, or slathering yourself in oil to trap  the right spirits inside your flesh, this is almost definitely  not the key to immortality. [ outro ]