HOW THE GLANDS WERE DISCOVERED 48 



crackled, the bourgeoisie chortled, the proletariat roared. The 

 Elixir of Life had been discovered and it was excellent sport. 



But Brown-Sequard remained unshaken. He had all the 

 roues of Paris running to him, and consequent charges of 

 quackery and charlatanism. How much of these unsavory epi- 

 thets really applied to him will not be determined until we have 

 a better acquaintance with his more intimate life. A biography 

 and collection of his letters is needed. But it is certain that the 

 general principles he arrived at, aided as much by the wings of 

 intuition as by the clues of incomplete and incompletely con- 

 trolled experiments, survive as the foundations of whatever we 

 know about the internal secretions, and all our present viewpoints. 

 He summed these up in 1891 as follows: 



"All the tissues, in our view, are modifiers of the blood by 

 means of an internal secretion taken from them by the venous 

 blood. From this we are forced to the conclusion that, if sub- 

 cutaneous injections of the liquids drawn from these parts are 

 ineffectual, then we should inject some of the venous blood sup- 

 plying these parts. . . . We admit that each tissue, and, more 

 generally, each cell of the organism, secretes on its own account, 

 certain products or special ferments, which, through this medium 

 (the blood), influence all other cells of the body, a definite 

 solidarity being thus established among all the cells through a 

 mechanism other than the nervous system. . . . All the tissues 

 (glands and other organs) have thus a special internal secretion, 

 and so give to the blood something more than the waste products 

 of metabolism. The internal secretions, whether by direct favor- 

 able influence, or whether through the obstacles they oppose to 

 deleterious processes, seem to be of great utility in maintaining 

 the organism in its normal state." 



The only part of this statement not conceded today is that 

 relating to the formation of internal secretions by tissues other 

 than those of which the cells are definitely glandular, that is 

 secretory: as can be determined under the microscope. Brown- 

 Sequard added to the concept of internal secretions, fathered by 

 Claude Bernard, the idea of a correlation, a mutual influencing 

 of them and of the different organs of the body through them. 

 The nervous system had hitherto been regarded as the sole means 

 of communication between cells, by its telegraphic arrangements 

 of nerve filaments reaching out everywhere, interweaving with 

 each other and the cells. The Brown-Sequard conception in- 

 ferred the existence of a postal system between cells, the blood 



