Talk:vasectomy

Other uses: to restore potency?

Can it, or was it once thought to, be used to "restore potency" in older men?

I read this, about the poet WB Yates, who died aged 75 in 1939, having had many mistresses:

Yeats believed virility was an integral part of his poetic gift. Five years before his death, London surgeon Norman Haire performed the “Steinach operation”, a partial vasectomy, to restore his potency. Haire indiscreetly told Yeats’s biographer Richard Ellmann that the operation failed, but Yeats thought it worked. He traced “the ferment that has come upon my imagination” to “the strange second puberty the operation has given me”.

• http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-end-of-yeats-work-and-women-in-his-last-days-in-france-1.1669759?page=3

If anyone knows enough to note this in the article, that would be great. Gronky (talk) 18:20, 28 January 2014 (UTC)