THE HORMONES IN HUMAN REPRODUCTION 



he felt much stronger and more alert, and reported his experi- 

 ence with pathetic enthusiasm and intimate personal detail 

 before the medical societies of Paris and in the journals. The 

 medical profession was on the whole incredulous and Paris 

 made a good deal of fun of him. We know now that the extract 

 could have had little or none of the genuine testis hormone in 

 it. It was made by putting mashed-up testes in water and 

 filtering the mixture. We are now well aware also that when a 

 man grows old he ages all over, not only in his testicles. 

 Nevertheless the idea of administering gland extracts had its 

 up-to-date appeal in those days of the earliest discoveries 

 about the endocrine organs. German biochemists had recently 

 isolated from animal testes a peculiar nitrogenous substance 

 called "spermine." Various people leaped to the conclusion 

 that this might be the active substance in Brown-Sequard's 

 extracts. Spermine was therefore put on the market under the 

 auspices of the chemist Poehl, and thus became (to the best 

 of my knowledge) the first endocrine product to be commer- 

 cialized. Thus Brown-Sequard's notoriety was probably re- 

 sponsible, more than anything else, for the exploitation of 

 endocrine preparations in the drug trade ahead of scientific 

 knowledge. Since then, barrelfuls of extracts and millions of 

 tablets have been fed and injected into human patients, with 

 uncritical optimism, before the chemists and physiologists 

 could learn the facts. The benefits of endocrine research on 

 the reproductive glands have almost been stifled by this 

 exploitation. Even today the practicing physician finds it 

 difficult to distinguish what is sound and practical amid the 

 flood of well advertised endocrine drugs. 



There have been premature efforts also to apply Berthold's 

 experiment of transplantation of the testis to the rejuvena- 

 tion of senile men. The most widely publicized of these was 

 that of the Franco-Russian surgeon Serge Voronoff, who was 

 busy from about 1912 to 1925 implanting monkey testes into 

 human patients. The American journalists of those days 



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