324 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
which has hitherto been the scourge of every great war. In the present 
war man-made implements of destruction are more deadly than ever 
before, but there is no question but that this added deadliness is more 
than compensated for by protection from diseases, which, up to the time 
of the Spanish-American war, always wrought more havoc than the 
enemy. Such diseases as typhoid, dysentery, typhus, tetanus, and yel- 
low fever have been shorn of their power by protective vaccinations. 
Closely related to the field of immunology is blood typing, which 
has placed blood transfusion on a safe and sound footing, and made 
it as routine a procedure as anesthesia or surgical asepsis. In spite 
of the accomplishments in the field of immunology in recent years, I 
think we may confidently look forward to ever greater things in the 
years to come. Within the past 12 months success has been attained 
for the first time in the artificial production of antibodies in laboratory 
flasks. This may open the door to future developments which may 
surpass anything we have yet been able to hope for. 
I wish now to turn your attention to another field of biology that 
has contributed enormously to medicine—the science of endocrinology. 
No sorcerer or magician of old ever dreamed of accomplishing the 
miracles that can be performed today by the application of knowledge 
in this field. Osler, speaking of the effect of thyroid extracts on those 
horribly misshapen, doltish creatures known as cretins, says, “Not the 
magic wand of Prospero or the brave kiss of the daughter of Hip- 
pocrates ever effected such a change as that which we are now enabled 
to make in these unfortunate victims, doomed heretofore to live in 
helpless imbecility—an unmistakable affliction to their parents and 
their relatives.” 
The science of endocrinology was born of primitive beliefs in organ 
magic. When our remote ancestors began to indulge in the art of 
thinking and had reached the stage at which they could weave together 
a number of scattered observations and come out with a general idea, 
it was a natural deduction that the kind of food you ate was a big 
factor in determining what sort of person you were. Tigers were 
thought to be fierce because they ate raw meat; it was overlooked 
that a tiger fed on lettuce and carrots would undoubtedly be fiercer 
still, and that a meat eater had to be fierce to get his meat whereas a 
vegetarian could afford to be timid and fleetfooted. Such thoughts, 
traveling along a single track, eventually reached the conclusion 
that courage could be acquired from eating the hearts of courageous 
animals or men, intelligence from eating brains, and so on. The 
psychological effects undoubtedly provided ample circumstantial evi- 
dence for the truth of the assumptions. 
Modern endocrinology began in 1889 when a famous French scien- 
tist, Brown-Sequard, claimed remarkable rejuvenating effects in him- 
