THE DUCTLESS GLANDULAR DISEASES 



CHAPTER I 



GENERAL PART 



Historical Development and Definition 



The clinical delimitation of a group of the disease pictures which to-day 

 are known as diseases of the ductless glands is to a certain extent very much 

 older than the conception of the idea of internal secretion as elaborated by 

 experimental pathology. The profound alterations in the bevelopment of 

 the human organism after removal of the sexual glands in early life are too 

 remarkable not to have awakened the interest of physicians and the laity 

 as early as the days of antiquity. The breeders of animals had made use of 

 empirical knowledge long before the question was discussed as to in which 

 way the sexual glands influence the formation of the body and its dis- 

 tribution of fat. A material progress, however, in the development of 

 the clinical aspects of the diseases of the ductless glands began only about 

 the middle of the igth century. It is associated indissolubly with the name 

 of Thomas Addison. Addison in 1855, on the ground of pathologico-anat- 

 omical findings, referred the sickness that bears his name to a destruction 

 of both suprarenal glands. Then after Gull, Ord, and Charcot had described 

 myxedema clinically, Theodore Kocher and Reverdin, in 1882 and 1883, 

 demonstrated that this disease picture is due to the absence of the functional 

 activities of the thyroid gland. We must regard the year 1886 as a further 

 landmark in the history of the diseases of the ductless glands. In this 

 year Mb'bius first expressed the idea that a disease picture Basedow's 

 disease depends on an abnormally increased activity of a ductless gland. 

 First in the year 1889 Brown-Sequard reported to the Biological Society of 

 Paris concerning experiments that made it seem as though the ductless 

 glands furnished to the blood substances that, when carried by the blood 

 to distant-lying organs, influenced these extensively. Brown-Sequard in- 

 jected juice of the testicle subcutaneously into his own body and observed 

 an increase in corporeal and mental powers that he attributed to the in- 

 fluence of these injections. It is true that Johannes Muller, Ruysch, and 

 other authors preceded Brown-Sequard; it was, however, Brown-Sequard who 

 first clearly formulated these thoughts, based them on experiments, and 

 thus attracted the general interest of the medical world to them. With 

 the extension of experimental pathology, disease pictures that had formerly 

 been regarded as nervous diseases or constitutional diseases were added to 



