THE MENSTRUAL CYCIiE 



with the pathologist William H. Welch, himself a young 

 man on his way to the Johns Hopkins and the leadership 

 of the American medical profession. One morning Welch 

 showed his pupils a tray containing a number of normal 

 ovaries, removed that morning in the operating rooms, and 

 took the occasion to denounce the practice of Battey's 

 operation in words so vigorous that Dr. Mulligan still re- 

 membered them more than forty years afterward. 



The point of all this is that removal of the normal human 

 ovaries was very often followed within a few days by a 

 period of bleeding from the uterus lasting several days. This 

 appears in many of the case reports in medical journals 

 from 1872 to 1885. The doctors did not always report all 

 the postoperative details, but when they did they generally 

 noted the hemorrhage, but never with comprehension. Thus 

 an important observation was missed because the observers' 

 minds were unprepared. 



We must digress for a moment to mention that under the 

 strict corpus luteum hypothesis of menstruation (which 

 I have for brevity called the German theory) removal of 

 the corpus luteum may be expected to bring on menstruation. 

 This had been perceived and demonstrated at the operating 

 table before 1927, when Allen announced, on the basis of 

 his experiments on monkeys, the broader fact that removal 

 of both ovaries, with or without a corpus luteum, has the 

 same effect. It may help keep things clear, if we point out 

 something the reader has probably thought out already, 

 namely that removal of a corpus luteum produces bleeding 

 from a premenstrual endometrium, whereas removal of the 

 ovaries without a corpus luteum produces bleeding from an 

 unaltered endometrium, as in anovulatory menstruation. 



Estrin-deprivation bleeding. Edgar Allen reasoned that 

 the effects of removal of the ovaries of his monkeys were 

 really due to removal of the estrogenic hormone, which had 

 recently been discovered, thanks so largely to his own in- 



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