AROUSED

A guided tour through the strange science of hormones and the age-old quest to control them.

On August 2nd, 1848, in his backyard in Göttingen, Germany, Dr. Arnold Berthold experimented with roosters. He castrated a few of them and watched them get fat and lazy. Their brilliant red combs faded. They stopped chasing hens. But the most telling was when he sewed one bird's testicle between the intestines of a castrated one. Berthold wondered whether testicles worked from anywhere in the body. They did.

AROUSED is a romp through the history of hormone science, populated by cinematic characters, scenes including a circus Fat Lady, a basement filled with jarred brains and a besotted couple who pioneered the treatment of the intersex. It includes audacious investigators and desperate patients. There are triumphsdoctors would learn to fix diseases caused by hormone-spewing brain tumors. There are tragediespatients were killed by hormone injections tainted with a deadly brain disease. But through it all, this is a story that illustrates our quest to understand how hormones control us, and our insatiable drive to control themand perhaps in the process control ourselves.

This is the story of our love affair with hormones from the moment we realized their unique qualities, through bold experiments, and the current state of affairs. It is a story of our sexuality, urges, and mood swings. It is the story of what makes us us.

Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D., M.P.H. is a medical writer, adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a part-time lecturer at Yale University. She earned an M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine, and an M.P.H. from the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. Randi worked as a medical writer for AP's London bureau and was the London bureau chief of Physicians' Weekly. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Parents, More, among other newspapers and magazines. Randi lives in New York City with her husband and four children. She is the author of GET ME OUT: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank (W.W. Norton, 2010).