Exactly 30 years ago a lecture was delivered in Las Vegas that flabbergasted the audience and changed the course of men’s health forever.

In an hour, it made an impact that would have taken conventional researchers years to achieve.

When Viagra hit the market 15 years later, it was credited with opening a new dimension in men’s health, but it was really this evening lecture delivered at a Urological Association of America conference in 1983 that shifted the paradigm.

The lecture is regularly recounted on its anniversary and has just been the subject of a talk by chairman of the World Urologic Oncology Federation, Professor Laurence Klotz.

He says nothing remotely similar has happened in the field since.

The lecture was delivered by a slightly “odd” British physiologist and as it was scheduled just before a formal dinner reception, the urologists had brought along their finely dressed wives.

At the time, very little was known about erectile physiology. The lecture, to be delivered by Professor Giles Skey Brindley, had an innocuous title.

Klotz was present and his account was later published in the British Journal of Urology International.

As he recalled, Brindley was dressed unexpectedly in a tracksuit. He began his lecture without aplomb and explained his hypothesis that it was possible to inject the penis to create an erection.

But he lacked ready access to an appropriate animal model and, cognisant of the long medical tradition of using oneself as a research subject, he explained that he had conducted a series of experiments on himself.

GOING THE EXTRA MILE TO PROVE HIS THEORY
He described how he had self-injected his penis with various chemicals. This is commonplace now, but was entirely unheard of then.

Unabashed, Brindley showed slides of his penis in various states of tumescence after various injections.

This left the audience in no doubt that, at least in this case, the therapy was effective, although the possibility that erotic stimulation had played a role in acquiring these erections could not be excluded.

Brindley had anticipated such a doubt and commented that no normal person would find the experience of giving a lecture to a large audience to be erotically stimulating.

He had therefore injected himself in his hotel room just before the lecture and wore loose clothes to make it possible to exhibit the results.

Then he stepped out from behind the podium and pulled his pants tight up around his genitalia to demonstrate his erection.

Everyone in the room was agog. People could scarcely believe what was occurring on stage.

But Brindley was not satisfied. He looked down sceptically at his pants and shook his head with dismay saying “unfortunately, this doesn’t display the results clearly enough”.

He then summarily dropped his trousers and shorts, revealing a long, thin, clearly erect penis. There was not a sound in the room. Everyone had stopped breathing.

He paused and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable.

He then said, with gravity, “I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence”.

With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows screamed.

The screams seemed to shock Brindley, who rapidly pulled up his trousers, returned to the podium, and terminated the lecture.

The crowd dispersed in a state of disarray. But through his dramatic lecture, he had made a spectacular contribution to the management of erectile dysfunction. He had reconceptualised the mechanics of an erection and shown that in the absence of psychological or emotional arousal, it could be a purely physiological event.

His single-author paper reporting these results was published six months later. In another paper, he reported the effect of 17 drugs injected into the penis to induce erection. Seven worked but it was never clear to what degree his own member served as the test subject.

Sir Giles, now 87, an Olympic pole vaulter and the inventor of an intuitive instrument called the “logical bassoon”, is also author of a book on crime, death and debauchery at Oxford.