history of endocrinology

1. Dr Sravan Kumar M.D Medicine
Assistant Professor
MRIMS

2.  THEVOICE OF AN ANGEL…
 castrato’, a famous presence in opera in the 16th, 17th
and 18th centuries
 ELIXIR OF LIFE?
 Berthold, a German physiologist transplanted testes
from intact birds into the capons’ abdomens, and
showed that they redeveloped normal male
characteristics
 neurologist Brown-Séquard who, in 1889 at the age of
72, reported to the Academy of Sciences in Paris that
he had injected himself with a mixture made up of the
blood from testicular veins, semen, and juices of the
testicles of dogs or guinea pigs

3.  PINKTHYROID JUICE
 Victor Horsley, a famous surgeon,showed that, by
removing the thyroid from monkeys, they developed the
changes of myxoedema, just like humans.
 George Murray cut sheep’s thyroids into small parts and
put them into carbolic acid, stoppered them overnight and
then filtered them through a handkerchief.This product he
called pink thyroid juice, and he injected it into a 46-year-
old female patient.
 Within 3 months, there was a miraculous improvement
in her appearance and her skin was less pale and her
energy improved.He carried on with regular injections and
this patient lived to the ripe old age of 74.

4.  OVARIAN HYSTERIA
 Up until the late 1800s, the ovary was thought to be part
of the nervous
system.
 Viennese gynaecologist Chobrak started removing the
ovaries of women in order to treat such conditions as
hysteria, anorexia, anxiety and even nymphomania
 Joseph Howden inVienna took the ovaries and
transplanted them into guinea pigs. He showed that these
reversed the changes caused by oophorectomy.
 this discovery effectively put an end to
the use of oophorectomies.

5.  ENTER ‘THE HORMONE’
 Ernest Starling was the frst to coin the term
‘hormone’, in the very early years of the 20th century.
The story goes that Starling was talkingto a colleague
at a Cambridge dinner, and they were both struggling
for a name for these secretions that could pass
through another part of the body and stimulate it
directly. A scholar of ancient Greek suggested the
word ‘ormao’, the Greek word for ‘excite’ or ‘stir up’ –
and thus the word ‘hormone’ entered the language.

6.  It had been known since the 19th century that if the
pancreas was removed from dogs they developed
diabetes.
 Frederick Banting, the unlikely discoverer of insulin in
the middle of the night, he hit upon the idea of
ligating the pancreatic duct while keeping the dogs
alive. Using this approach, the exocrine part of the
pancreas became inactive. After 6 weeks, the dogs
were sacrifced and their pancreases removed,
which enabled insulin to be extracted.