278 PHARMACEUTICAL BACTERIOLOGY 



the earlier efforts of Brown-Sequard. Brown-Sequard was a keen investi- 

 gator endowed with a fertile imagination. He assumed that all tissues 

 gave off or secreted substances to the blood which were essential to life 

 and which were peculiar to each kind of animal. He made the mistake 

 of taking the public into his experimental confidence with the result that 

 his work was made so ridiculous through the lay press that he became 

 entirely discouraged and all that he did was discredited and soon almost 

 entirely forgotten, to be again revived within two decades. 



Until about thirty years ago, the physiologists gave practically no 

 attention to the ductless glands, merely mentioning them and suggesting 

 that they were functionless vestigial remnants of once larger and function- 

 ally active glands. This idea based on ignorance had the effect of en- 

 couraging surgical removal of the supposedly useless structures, for little 

 or no cause. Today, for example, the removal of the tonsils has become a 

 craze, equalled only by the wholesale extraction of teeth and the snipping 

 of vermiform appendices. Dr. Williams (in the Practitioner, Jan. 1915) 

 makes this terse and truthful statement which is equally applicable to 

 the operative procedures above indicated. " The truth is, these operative 

 procedures (in Grave's disease) represent the heroic application of loose 

 conclusions from insufficient data." 



The work done on internal secretions since 1889 has demonstrated 

 the following: 



1. All of the glands, those with ducts as well as those without ducts, 

 secrete substances which are thrown back into the circulation and which 

 are more or less essential to the normal functioning of the body. 



2. Some of the glandular secretions are absolutely essential to life, 

 as those of the suprarenals, the parathyroids and the pancreas; while 

 others are not essential to continued life*, as those of the testes, the ovaries, 

 the spleen and the tonsils. 



3. The functional activities of most of the glands, if not all of them, is 

 interrelated, and again the activities of all of the glands are interrelated 

 with the functional activities of all of the somatic body cells and with the 

 germatic cells. That is, any serious disturbance of any one gland is apt 

 to react upon the activities of the other glands and upon the body cells. 

 On the other hand, the disturbance of the function of the body cells will 

 react upon the activities of the glands. 



4. A lessening of a glandular function, or of the functioning of body 

 cells is apt to be compensated by an increased or otherwise modified 

 functioning of some other gland or glands. Law of compensating bodily 

 functions. 



The glands in general secrete substances which influence the activities 

 of the bodily organs. Chemical substances of this kind, which stimulate 



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