INTERRELATIONS OF SECRETIONS 45 
ever, especially in the fields of surgery. The medical 
profession has to be one step ahead of the laity or it is 
very likely to condemn the subject in question; but in 
the course of time, practical scientists insist on the 
reintroduction of anything really useful and scientific 
which will benefit mankind. 
That the internal secretions and their possibilities 
are now being widely recognized is patent even to the 
prejudiced, and this in spite of untoward publicity in 
the press. One of the most prominent of the world’s 
medical weeklies has for the past few months been in- 
cluding in its leading papers pithy articles on the sub- 
ject (1). 
One cannot go very far into the study of the internal 
secretions without being struck with the fact that there 
is a possibility of the endocrine glands having some 
close relation to one another. Physiology has demon- 
strated beyond a doubt that in the functioning of the 
digestive secretions certain “hormones” are necessary 
to maintain the balance and provide certain stimuli to 
the glands producing these secretions to maintain qual- 
ity and quantity at normal (2). The fact that a hor- 
mone may augment a mental stimulus is more or less 
simulated in the fact that a man’s well-being depends 
as much upon the endocrine balance as upon mental 
stimuli that have no particular relation to endocrine 
function. The mental stimulation in both cases is more 
or less fleeting while the hormones and internal secre- 
tions have to “carry on.” It is a coincidence that Star- 
ling should have given such a stimulus to our present- 
day conception of endocrinology and to have coined the 
term “hormone” in relation to the digestive stimula- 
tion (3). 
Although the relationship of certain endocrine 
glands with one another has been demonstrated 
these many years, it is only in the last decade that the 
