38 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



servations," his training in the indirect reasoning and deductions 

 of the clinician prevented him from going right on to a direct 

 experimental test of his theories. 



This Brown-Sequard proceeded to do. Removing the adrenal 

 ghmds in several species of animals, he found, meant a terrible 

 weakness in twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and death shortly 

 after. If only one were removed, there was no change apparent 

 in the normal animal, but death occurred rapidly upon removal 

 of the other, even after a long interval. Furthermore, trans- 

 fusion of blood from a normal into one deprived of its supra- 

 renals prevented death for a long time, indicating that the 

 suprarenals normally secreted something into the blood neces- 

 sary to life. 



The years 1855-1856 beheld two other important glands of 

 internal secretion, the thyroid, the gland in the neck astride the 

 windpipe, and the thymus, in the chest above the heart, make 

 their debut. 



The thymus was introduced by the great classic monograph 

 of Friedleben on the "Physiology of the Thymus," in which he 

 mentioned the usual forgotten pioneers: Felix Plater, a Swiss 

 physician, who in 1614 had found an enlarged thymus in an 

 infant dying suddenly, and Restelli, an Italian, who interested 

 himself in the effects of removal of the thymus more than ten 

 years before. Friedleben believed that in the young without 

 a thymus, there occurred a softening of the bones, and general 

 physical and mental deterioration. He started the ball rolling 

 for a number of researches. 



Moritz Schiff, of Frankfort-on-the-Main, showed that excision 



of the thyroid gland in dogs is invariably fatal. A number of 



physicians in the first half of the century had reported certain 



remarkable symptoms associated with enlargement of the thyroid 



gland, as goitre. In 1825 the collected posthumous writings of 



b Perry, an eminent physician of Bath, England, recorded 



eight cases, in which, together with enlargement of the gland, 



developed enlargement and palpitation of the heart, a dis- 



protrusion of the eyes from their sockets and an appearance 



tat ion and distress. SchifT's paper was the first to throw 



any light on the subject. But for some reason, probably the 



same as in Berthold's forlorn experiments with the sex glands, 



the work of a person of no importance was ignored, or perhaps 



the mere charitable view is that it was forgotten. Yet the tide 



of observation kept sweeping in relevant data. 



