THE MALE HORMONE 



Fig. 32. The effect of testis hormone on the rooster's comb, a, untreated 

 castrated cockerel. 6, castrated cockerel after 11 days' treatment with 

 testis extract. Drawn from photograph by Freud and coworkers. 



isolated, completely purified and identified two of these com- 

 pounds, called respectively androsterone and dehydroandro- 

 sterone, in 1931-1932. L. Ruzicka and his colleagues at 

 Basel made them synthetically in 1934. The next year David, 

 Dingemanse, Freud and Laqueur of Amsterdam succeeded 

 in the difficult task of purifying the hormone from extracts 

 of the testis itself, and found the substance called testoste- 

 rone, which differs slightly in its chemical constitution from 

 the androsterone found in urine. The groups of workers led 

 by Butenandt and Ruzicka immediately synthesized this hor- 

 mone as well. Now that such substances could be made in the 

 test tube as well as in the testis, and (as we shall see) began 

 to be found in other tissues also, the adjective "male" as 

 applied to them gave place to the more apt word "andro- 

 genic," meaning "promoting masculinity"; the latter word 

 defines the effects without implying any particular place of 

 origin and can therefore be used of such substances when, for 

 example, they turn up in female urine, in the cortex of the 

 adrenal gland, or in a chemist's flask. 



Chemistry of the androgenic hormones. These substances 

 belong to the same family of chemical substances as the estro- 



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