THE SUPRARENAL SYSTEM 125 



This fortunate chance was a long time in coming. In 1819, 

 Caillau made Montesquieu's judgment public, at the same time 

 reviewing the work of the century following it, and his summary 

 was this : " Les anatomistes n'ont pas pu decouvrir 1'usage des 

 glandes surrenales . . . Nous ne sommes pas plus avances 

 aujourd'hui sur les glandes dont il est question que du temps du 

 fameux Eustache qui en parle le premier." 



Caillau 's view was right in so far as it concerned the function 

 of the suprarenals; but it must not be forgotten that the i8th cen- 

 tury added largely to our knowledge of the anatomy of these 

 organs. In 1752, J. B. Winslow published an exact description 

 of the anatomy of the human suprarenals, and at the beginning of 

 the igth century (1806) J. F. Meckel's comparative anatomy of the 

 suprarenals appeared, a work the importance of which it is difficult 

 to over-estimate. 



In the course of the next fifty years, important additions were 

 made to the morphology of the subject. In 1846 A. Ecker gave 

 an exact description of the minute structure of the suprarenals as 

 revealed by the microscope. Leydig's work in comparative mor- 

 phology (1851-1853) and A. Kolliker's epoch-making description 

 of the histological structure of the suprarenals (1854) were of the 

 highest importance to the later development of our knowledge of 

 the subject. 



The year 1855 marks both a turning-point and the commence- 

 ment of a new era in suprarenal research. All that had gone 

 before served merely as the foundation for a profound and far- 

 reaching doctrine concerning the physiological and pathological 

 significance of these organs, a doctrine which to-day is, 

 in certain directions, still awaiting completion. 'At that 

 date, the work of nearly three centuries had supplied 

 all that was to be known macroscopically of the anatomy of 

 the suprarenals ; there was a certain small amount of knowledge 

 of the embryology, teratology and pathological anatomy 

 of the subject ; the keen research of the fifty previous 

 years had supplied important data in the department of com- 

 parative anatomy; whilst as much was known of the minute 

 structure as the means of that day permitted. But the physiology 

 of the suprarenal capsules was a sealed book. The older authors, 

 it is true, formulated vague and generally insufficiently grounded 

 hypotheses concerning the functional significance of these organs ; 

 more modern observers, basing their views upon the results of 

 investigation in comparative anatomy and histology, arrived at 

 more or less well-founded suppositions ; but in no case did either 

 observation or experiment bring to light a single fact concerning 

 the functional activity of these organs in any direction whatsoever. 



It was in 1855 that Thomas Addison published his book 

 " On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Supra- 

 renal Capsules " a work in which a clinical condition observed 



