THE HORMONES IN HUMAN REPRODUCTION 



whether perhaps the placenta makes enough to serve in place 

 of the corpus luteum, we do not yet know (Appendix II, 

 note 7). 



Progesterone as a medicinal drug. Progesterone is already 

 in the drugstores. It comes in neat little boxes of glass am- 

 poules filled with a bright clear oily solution, duly labeled 

 with the hormone content in international units. Tablets of 

 the similar substance that acts by mouth (page 118) are also 

 available for trial. Prescriptions for these drugs will be filled 

 no less readily, though somewhat more expensively, than for 

 digitalis or belladonna. 



Before we expect the doctors to cure people with the 

 ovarian hormones, however, let us consider the special circum- 

 stances. To take a quite different case, when Banting, Best, 

 Collip, and McLeod handed over the pancreatic hormone, 

 insulin, to the medical profession, they were filling a specific, 

 clearly understood need. They had worked out the insulin 

 problem by experiments on dogs. Sugar is sugar, whether a 

 dog burns it or a man, and the way in which different animals 

 use sugar is the same, regardless of the species. Diabetes, 

 moreover, was a well understood disease, and in the minds of 

 the medical profession it was waiting to be treated with this 

 hormone as a lock waits for the key. 



To take another example, the hormone of the adrenal 

 medulla, epinephrin (trade name Adrenalin) has a relatively 

 simple, direct action. What it will do, what it is needed for, is 

 fairly clear. It can be used for acute asthma, or for bleeding 

 from mucous membranes, with understanding and with rea- 

 sonable hope that it will be effective under the circumstances. 



This is unfortunately not the case with endocrine disease 

 of the reproductive system. The human uterus and the rest 

 of the system behave quite differently from those of most 

 other animals. We cannot, for example, apply directly to 

 humans with regard to disturbances of menstruation or preg- 

 nancy, information gained from the lower mammals, because 



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