510 SUTHERLAND SIMPSON 



the clinician, rightly or wrongly, to associate these glands with the various 

 forms of tetany and allied conditions. 







Experimental Pathology 



Earlier Observations. The earliest recorded experiments on animals 

 bearing on the physiology of the parathyroids are those of Raynard in 

 1834-35. In the operative treatment of goiter in dogs he states that the 

 thyroid gland may be removed in old animals with great advantage; the 

 operation is frequently successful in dogs of medium age, but in pups, up 

 till the second or third month, it ends fatally within a few days. As we 

 now know, it was the loss of the parathyroids that must have been responsi- 

 ble for the death of these animals. 



V. Rapp in 1840 stated that in removing the thyroid gland in goitrous 

 dogs the animals frequently died a few days after the operation. 



Schiff (a) (1859) was the first to attack the- problem seriously from the 

 experimental side. He removed the thyroids from a number of animals 

 of different species rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, dogs, fowls and found 

 that, while many survived, several dogs, a cat, and a rat died within a few 

 days. He does not describe the symptoms before death, except to say that 

 the dogs showed a distinct hesitation in their movements. In his descrip- 

 tion Schiff quotes Lacauchie as having produced violent symptoms in dogs 

 which died within twenty-four hours of the removal of one lobe of the 

 thyroid gland. This is probably the earliest account of postoperative 

 tetany in the literature. 



In 1884, stimulated by the clinical observations of Reverdin, Kocher, 

 and others, Schiff (b) again gave his attention to the subject. In the early 

 eighties, when the principles of Lister had rendered surgical operations 

 comparatively safe, Kocher, Reverdin, and Billroth were induced to re- 

 move goitrous glands in the human subject, for the simple purpose of get- 

 ting rid of the physical deformity. At that time the existence of the para- 

 thyroids was unknown, except to Sandstrom, who first described them in 

 1880, and the few people who had happened to read his paper, and the 

 thyroid was not believed to have any important function, hence no serious 

 consequences were anticipated from its removal. In several cases., how- 

 ever, acute nervous symptoms followed, and it was, no doubt, the wide- 

 spread interest taken in these results at the time that led Schiff to return 

 to the subject of thyroid extirpation in animals, which he had abandoned 

 many years previously. 



Schiff was a pioneer in many fields. In 1884 he published a report of 

 his investigations. In the rat and rabbit no symptoms followed the re- 

 moval of the gland. In the dog and cat, on the other hand, the result was 

 almost invariably fatal. Of sixty dogs, the great majority died with acute 



