#Monkey quest windows#
Locals tell stories of the monkeys escaping on occasion and getting up to mischief such as tapping on the windows of perplexed townsfolk.Īuthor Doug Saxon who penned a book titled A History of Eraring and its School said even back then the doctor and his team of assistants made numerous headlines.ĭr Leighton-Jones had assembled a group including another surgeon, two anaesthetists and a barber to help him with the surgeries. I remember I used to look up and see them capering about in there.' 'He'd replaced the corrugated iron with cyclone wire and that's where he kept the monkeys. 'I remember the old water tank was about 30 feet high,' Jackie Parker, who had a bread delivery run in the area as a young boy, said. The monkeys would be shipped over and kept in a converted water tank on his farm. He would source the monkeys from the Sultan of Johor in Malaysia after he struck up a friendship several years earlier at a medical conference in Singapore.
Over the next decade Dr Jones would conduct his experiments on gland grafting - but unlike Dr Voronoff, he insisted on using Rhesus monkeys. His theories, however, were widely controversial and he was ridiculed and dismissed by his peers in the 1920s and 1930s.ĭr Leighton-Jones conducted multiple operations where he grafted the testicles and ovaries of monkeys onto humans but died of a heart attack before he could present his findingsĭr Jones returned to NSW in 1929 with Dr Voronoff's English secretary Nora Elizabeth Barrett - in her early twenties - and they later married. The Russian would later reportedly earn a small fortune doing the gland transplants from baboons into wealthy Europeans. He was already performing gland grafting operations animals such as sheep and goats - which involved transplanting a slice of gland into the gland of a different animal - when Dr Leighton-Jones arrived on his doorstep.ĭr Voronoff took him in and the pair spent several months working on the technique. 'He was a serious scientist,' retired surgeon Dr Herbert Copeman told the SMH in 2007.ĭr Copeman, who has held the positions of Honorary Consultant in General Medicine and Endocrinology at Royal Perth Hospital and President of the Australian Postgraduate Federation in Medicine in Australia, was one of the few surgeons who have taken an interest in Dr Jones' work, describing him as 'an honourable, hard-working, brilliant man'.ĭr Jones' studies into endocrinology led him to seek out Russian doctor Serge Voronoff who was the director of experimental surgery at the College de France in Paris.ĭr Voronoff previously worked as the Khedive Surgeon-General in Egypt and noticed that eunuchs in the harem would age at a faster rate compared to other men - leading him to draw the conclusion that testicles played a role in aging. He retired from his government role in 1928 when he was aged 60, and moved back south to the suburb of Eraring in Lake Macquarie where he began to pursue his interest in endocrinology which was at that point an entirely new field.
When war broke out he was stationed in the Pacific for a short stint as a captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps Reserve. Upon returning to NSW he worked as a dentist, doctor and pharmacist for a decade before taking on the role of government medical officer in the Northern Territory in 1916.
While either in the United States or Britain he dated an American girl by the name of Leighton and liked the name so much he incorporated it into his own.
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He then travelled to Britain where he joined the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians and Glasgow Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons, which granted him license him to practice medicine back in New South Wales. Luck struck when a coal seam was discovered underneath his family farm and when the property was sold, he used his share to travel to America where he studied dentistry and medicine in Kentucky. Dr Henry Leighton-Jones (pictured) conducted bizarre experiments where he grafted monkey testicles onto men in a quest to find a fountain of youth during the 1930sīorn in the NSW town of Cardiff, near Newcastle in 1868, Henry Jones left school at 14 to work as a postal clerk for a nearby coal mine.