34 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



sugar corresponding to the analysis established for the other 



5. The liver, therefore, must add sugar to the blood on its 

 way to the heart. Extraction of the liver then revealed the 

 presence in it of a form of starch, an animal starch, which Ber- 



: called glycogen, the sugar-maker. The origin of the sugar 



added to the blood on its way from the liver to the heart was 



settled. Bernard went on to hail glycogen and the sugar 



derivable as the internal secretions of the liver, and to erect, and 



then drive home, a theory of internal secretions and their impor- 



o in the body economy. 

 The case he had hit upon was exquisitely fortunate, as the 

 liver had hitherto been regarded purely a gland of external 

 secretion, the bile. Nowadays, glycogen and the blood sugar are 

 not considered internal secretions, because they are classified as 

 elementary reserve food, while the concept of the internal secre- 

 tions has become narrowed down to substances acting as starters 

 or inhibitors of different processes. Moreover, the process of 

 liberation of sugar from glycogen itself in the liver, upon demand, 

 is today set down to the action of an internal secretion, adrenalin. 

 Claude Bernard's conception, like a novelist's characters, has 

 turned upon its creator, taken on a life of its own, and evolved 

 into something he never intended. He looked upon an internal 



Mon as simply maintaining the normal composition of the 

 blood, which bathed alike and treated alike the democracy of 

 cells. Today, the blood is believed merely the transporting 

 medium for the internal secretion, destined for a particular group 

 of cells. 



Addison's as the First English Contribution 



The years 1855-56 are red-letter years in the history of the 

 plands of internal secretion. They witnessed, not only the pub- 

 lication of Claude Bernard's "Lectures on Experimental Physi- 

 ology," but also the appearance of a monograph by Thomas 

 Addison, an English physician, entitled "On the constitutional 

 Mid local effects of disease of the suprarenal bodies." In this, 

 he described a fatal disease during which the individual affected 

 ! inguid and weak, and developed a dingy or smoky 

 ion of the whole surface of the body, a browning or 

 \ of the skin, caused generally by destructive tubercu- 

 ase of the suprarenal or adrenal bodies. Addison 

 i'tly put down these constitutional effects of loss of the 



