The internal secretions--some clinical aspects illustrated / By Wm. Seaman Bainbridge.

  • Bainbridge, William Seaman, 1870-1947
Date:
1915
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The internal secretions--some clinical aspects illustrated / By Wm. Seaman Bainbridge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    contained sixty-four ingredients, but by the time it reached the Phar¬ macopeia Germanica it had been reduced to twelve. Doubtless the witches’ broth was inspired by the un-expurgated prescription for this celebrated remedy. In the dispensatories and pharmacopeias of the sixteenth century were mentioned such animal products as “distillates of capon and pul¬ let wolf liver; fox lung; deer spine; inner membrane of chicken stomach; sheep’s wool; toothed jaw of pike; rabbit’s hair and foot; gallstones of ox ; ashes of swallows, sparrows, scorpions and centi¬ pedes. The pharmacist of that time, according- to accounts, had to keep in stock “poor sinner’s fat, “cranium humanum,” “oleum ossium humanorum, and other products which mav be said to have fore¬ shadowed the organic therapeutic preparations to be found in the phar¬ macy of today. It goes without saying that all this was empirical; yet the ancient Egyptians, the Persians of the time of Susruta, the Greeks and Romans of the times of Hippocrates, Pliny, and Galen, who employed healthy animal tissues, organs or secretions, in the treatment of disease, must- have had some conceptions which suggested, however vaguely, the possibility of the presence in certain organs of substances which might exert a regulatory influence upon the functions of similar organs and of the body as a whole. Thus we see that the relatively new science which deals with the study of the internal secretions and their effects may be traced far beyond Brown-Sequard, and his organo-therapy, beyond Claude Ber¬ nard and Berthold, who laid the foundation for the scientific study of the ductless glands ; still further backward to Susruta, Galen, Hip¬ pocrates, and others of our medical forefathers who, in the distant past, foreshadowed endocrinology, hormone-therapy, hemadenology, or the study of the internal secretions, by whatever name the science may be called. It was not, therefore, a perfectly new idea which Berthold, Claude Bernard, and Brown-Sequard suggested and elaborated, when they declared their belief in the physiological influence exerted by the se¬ cretions of the ductless and other glands. Much of the primitive and entirely empirical conception of the treatment of disease by means of animal tissues was the result of the age-long and world-wide search for the Fountain of Perpetual Youth —“perpetual youth meaning to the Ancients very largely a matter of the maintenance or restoration of sexual vigor. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that perhaps the earliest and most conspicuous reference to organo-therapy related to the use of the orchitic substance in the treatment of impotence, credited to