THE PITUITAEY GLAND 49 



deficiency of pituitary activity, and for years scien- 

 tists blindly believed in this theory, attempting by 

 extirpation experiments on animals to reproduce 

 acromegalic symptoms. All such experiments re- 

 sulted in failure. To-day we know the reason why. 

 The acromegalic in all probability suffers from an 

 excess rather than from a deficiency of pituitary 

 hormone, or hormones. 



Only since 1895 has intelligent guesswork given 

 place to a fair amount of knowledge. 



Removal of the pituitary. Complete removal of 

 the pituitary gland causes death. Innumerable 

 experiments with puppies show that death results 

 in from two to thirty days. Where the life of the 

 animal is prolonged, a post-mortem examination 

 reveals that a portion of the gland still remains. 

 Gushing, as the result of some 200 such extirpa- 

 tions on dogs, has come to the following important 

 conclusions: that a prolongation of life, if not a 

 complete recovery, is possible by transplanting the 

 gland into an animal that had had its pituitary 

 removed; that whenever the animal survives the 

 operation, it is because the gland, and more particu- 

 larly the anterior 1 portion of it, has not been com- 

 pletely removed; and that when the posterior por- 

 tion alone is removed, the animal does not die. It 

 follows then that the pituitary is a gland essential 



1 Any part nearer the head than another part is anterior to 

 the latter ; if farther away it is posterior. 



