HOW THE GLANDS WERE DISCOVERED 41 



pituitary was essayed by Horsley in 1886, the same man who 

 two years before had reproduced myxedema successfully in 

 monkeys. Others succeeded his attempt. But the conclusions 

 drawn were uncertain or contradictory, resulting from the 

 difficulties of the operative technique of getting at a gland placed 

 at the base of the brain. Not until 1908 was the problem solved 

 by Paulesco of Bucharest, who devised a way of reaching it by 

 trepanning the skull. He was thus able to prove beyond a doubt 

 that the pituitary gland was essential to life, and that without 

 it no animal could continue to live for any length of time. Soon 

 after, Harvey Cushing and his associates at Johns Hopkins Hos- 

 pital discovered that removal of part of the gland was followed 

 by a pronounced obesity and sluggishness. A basis for the under- 

 standing of obesity and growth was then established. 



In the eighties, there came to the clinic of Pierre Marie in 

 Paris, a pupil of the great Charcot, various women complaining 

 of headache. They also told him about an enlargement of their 

 hands and feet, and an alarming change in the bones of the face. 

 He differentiated the affection from its imitators, and created its 

 present designation of "acromegaly" (enlargement of the extremi- 

 ties). Also he correlated their relationship to the giants who 

 have been mentioned. Acromegalics have been also likened to 

 the Neanderthal Man, who had probably, as the gorillas may 

 have, an excess of the pituitary in their systems. For four years 

 he studied the morbid phenomena in the tissues of these sufferers 

 at last consigned to their end. First one, and then another, and 

 then a third and a fourth exhibited a striking hypertrophy of 

 the pitu'tary body and a consequent widening of the portion of 

 the bas( of the skull which cradles the gland. He proceeded to 

 say so a the graduating thesis of his pupil, Souza Leite. The 

 inferem e was inevitable that the entire process was to be put 

 down to an overactivity of the pituitary. Ever since, too, the 

 growth of the skeleton has been accepted as controlled by that 

 gland. 



About this time another set of old observations came to life 

 again, related to those of Docent Berthold on the auto-grafting of 

 the testes of a cock, with complete retention of its sexual char- 

 acters, which he said, must be due "to the productive action of 

 the testes, i. e., to its effect upon the blood, and thence to the 

 corresponding effect of such blood upon the entire organism." 

 Of course, stock raisers and poultry fanciers have noted the inter- 

 esting outcome of castration for about as long as their professions 



