Medicine: Back to the Third Eye?

Descartes believed the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, and doctors later thought it was man's third or inner eye. The pineal (from the Latin word for pine cone, which it resembles in shape) is a small gland attached to the midbrain.

Doctors, while not certain of what function the organ really performs, have known for years that schizophrenic patients improved after injections of an extract from the pineal glands of cattle. Trouble was that after a few days the patients stopped responding to the treatment and soon relapsed into their former state. Harvard University's Dr. Mark D. Altschule guessed...

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