HUMAN INFERTILITY 



ALLAN WINTER ROWE 



Director of Research, Evans Memorial, Massachusetts Memorial Hospitals, Boston, 



Massachusetts 



Endocrine Aspects 



The science of eugenics deals with the improvement of race by selective 

 breeding. Infertility must be regarded as a true eugenic agent where it 

 prevents the transmission of the undesirable qualities or conditions which 

 have engendered it, as for example, in the syphilitic. Equally, however, 

 there are many physical factors lowering the mating index to the point of 

 unproductive union, following the correction or palliation of which truly 

 eugenic offspring may be engendered. For this reason, studies of the 

 physical impedances to fertile union and the methods for correcting them 

 may be offered with propriety to a group of eugenists. 



Among the several highly significant constitutional factors which may 

 determine a relative infertility, aberrant function of the individual glands 

 of internal secretion play a most important role. These powerful regulators 

 of growth and development, operating severally through their incretory 

 activities, influence both directly and indirectly the ultimate productivity 

 of the individual. How far functional derangements of the endocrine 

 glands in man should be regarded as hereditary, transmissible characters, 

 remains for a later generation to determine. The just recognition of endo- 

 crine disorders in all but a few conditions exhibiting gross somatic change 

 such as acromegaly and exophthalmic goiter, is very far from complete even 

 today. A generation ago, what may be called the science of endocrinology 

 was scarcely in its infancy. True, a thyroid enlargement of sufficient 

 magnitude could be and was frequently recognized; and in not a few in- 

 stances, as we know today, incorrectly interpreted in terms of abnormal 

 function. Barring the rare disease acromegaly with its striking somatic 

 changes, pituitary malfunctions fail to produce any such characteristic 

 stigmata as the goiter. It is to this fact that I ascribe the greater frequency 

 of reported thyroid disease in the family histories of the present generation. 

 In a current consecutive series of 2100 cases, carefully studied for diagnostic 

 purposes, there were 1440 patients with pituitary as against 660 with thyroid 

 malfunction. 



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