HOW THE GLANDS WERE DISCOVERED 33 



wife or kin, to push him, and no audience to stimulate him. His 

 poor four little pages of a report, published ten years before 

 Darwin's "Origin of Species," attracted not the slightest notice. 

 Buried in the print of a journal with a subscription list of pos- 

 sibly two or three hundred, of whom perhaps two dozen may have 

 been interested enough to read it, but without any recorded 

 reaction on the part of any of them, it was a flash in the pan. 

 Though it was good, original, conclusive stuff, it was cut dead, 

 absolutely, by the scientific world. As a result, forty years 

 elapsed before the implications of his studies were rediscovered 

 by the Columbus of the modern approach to the internal secre- 

 tions, the American Frenchman, Brown-Sequard. 



It took a first class man of genius in his field, in Paris, with a 

 respected position in the whirl of its medical planetary system 

 and a university appointment, to boom and advertise the doc- 

 trine of the internal secretions, so that people began to sit up 

 and listen and take sides — on the wrong grounds. This French- 

 man was Claude Bernard. At a series of lectures on experi- 

 mental physiology delivered at the College of France, in 1855, 

 he coined the terms internal secretion and external secretion and 

 emphasized the opposition between them, on the basis of an in- 

 correct example, the function of the liver in the supply of sugar 

 to the blood. 



Just as Columbus reached America, carried on a series of 

 logical syllogisms, built upon unreal pictures of a straight .path 

 to the East, Claude Bernard opened up the continent of the 

 internal secretions to the experimental enthusiasts of his time 

 by a discovery which today is not grouped among the phenomena 

 of internal secretion at all. In attempting to throw light upon 

 the disease diabetes, in which there is a loss of the normal ability 

 of the cells to burn up sugar, he examined the sugar content of 

 the blood in different regions of the body. He found that the 

 blood of the veins, in general, contained less sugar than the 

 blood of the arteries, which meant that sugar was taken from 

 the blood in passing through the tissues. But the venous blood 

 of the right side of the heart contained as much sugar as the 

 arterial blood. Evidently, somewhere, sugar was added to the 

 blood in the veins before it got to the heart. The blood of 

 the vein which goes from the liver to the right side of the heart 

 was then found to contain a higher percentage of sugar than is 

 present in the arteries. The vein which transmits the blood from 

 the intestines to the liver had the usual lower percentage of 



