CHAPTER IV 



THE HORMONE OF PREPARATION AND MATURITY 



THE ovary was very slow to yield the two great secrets 

 of its function. The fact that mammals and man 

 breed by means of eggs, and that the ovary is the 

 source of the eggs, was not even conjectured until 1672, and 

 was not proved (as we have seen, p. 34) until 1827. The fact 

 that the ovary is an organ of internal secretion was not 

 clearly stated until 1900. 



The ancients knew of course that the organs we now call 

 the ovaries are homologous with the male testicles and have 

 something to do with reproduction; in fact, the Greeks and 

 Romans called them "the female testes." Castration of female 

 animals to prevent them from breeding is a very old practice. 

 The verb "to spay," meaning to castrate the female, goes 

 back to late Middle English, and practitioners of that art 

 were called "sow-gelders" as early as 1515, judging from a 

 citation in the New English Dictionary. These men must have 

 known that removal of the ovaries stops the estrous cycles, 

 and anybody who butchered a spayed sow would surely notice 

 that in the absence of the ovaries the uterus shrinks far below 

 its normal size. But these facts, even if known from observa- 

 tions on animals, did not get into the textbooks of human 

 physiology until the surgeons began to remove human ovaries. 

 That operation, first made possible in 1809 by the courage of 

 Ephraim McDowell and of his patient, Jane Crawford, was 

 fairly common by 1850. The great physiologist Carl Ludwig 

 said, in his textbook of 1856, that in humans loss of the 

 ovaries not only stops the menstrual cycles, but also causes 

 the uterus to shrink. 



This matter of castrate atrophy furnished a really impor- 

 tant clue. It deserves careful explanation. When the ovaries 

 of an adult female are removed, the oviducts, uterus, and 



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