THE HORMONES IN HUMAN REPRODUCTION 



In short, it would be premature to let the pellet method out- 

 weigh, in these very crude calculations, the results from in- 

 jections, about which at present wc know very much more; 

 and therefore I propose to maintain for the present the esti- 

 mate arrived at above, namely that a female Rhesus monkey 

 produces from her two ovaries estrogenic hormone equivalent 

 to about 200 international units of estrone daily. 



If this were actually estrone, the daily output would weigh 

 0.02 milligram. 



Application of these calculations to the human female. 

 Can we apply this estimate to the human female? A woman 

 weighs on the average 15 times as much as a monkey. Two 

 hundred international units x 15 gives 3,000 international 

 units as the daily output of the woman's ovaries. Various 

 medical observations which have been published might be 

 analyzed to give us some sort of check on the estimate. My 

 friend, W. M. Allen, for example, informs me that in his 

 treatment of women whose ovaries had been removed previ- 

 ously he could induce menstruation-like bleeding with estro- 

 genic hormone equivalent to about 4,200 international units 

 of estrone daily. This figure, which is the most pertinent I 

 can find, is roughly 50 per cent higher than my calculation 

 from the monkey experiments, but we have no way of telling 

 how closely this amount compares with that needed by a 

 normal woman. Perhaps what Allen was trying to do re- 

 quired more, perhaps less, than the normal output. 



Unfortunately we cannot get help in this problem by meas- 

 uring the estrogen discharged in the urine, because we do not 

 know just what relationship exists between the hormone which 

 is at work in the body and that which is excreted. The num- 

 ber of milligrams of estriol and similar substances recovered 

 from the urine does not tell us how much of the ovarian 

 hormone was made and used in the body (Appendix II, note 

 16). 



This chapter has contained, after all, a good deal of valiant 



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