(2 of 3)
The human result of the discovery of every new hormone is potentially profound, particularly in case of disease. Diabetics no longer die of diabetes simply because Canadian investigators isolated insulin from the pancreas. Women have shorter labor pains because a chemical which causes the womb to contract was found in the pituitary and obstetricians learned how to utilize it. More broadly, knowledge of the hormones enables anthropologists to say that Scandinavians are tall because their pituitary produces large amounts of growth hormone and placid because their sex glands produce a relatively insufficient supply of sex hormones. Contrariwise, sexuality seems to predominate in fervent and short individuals. With knowledge of hormones now on hand a bold gland expert may yet be able to make a baby grow up into the kind of man or woman the parents wish. But first the gland man must treat the parents with proper hormones.
Thus, a girl is vivacious partly because female sex hormones are flushing through her system. She can wear few clothes in winter because theelin, one of those sex hormones, keeps her skin irrigated with warm blood.
Or, again, a snub nose and bulging forehead demonstrate that the individual's thyroid was functioning poorly when, as a baby, his bones were hardening. For a time he lacked adequate thyroxine, the thyroid's hormone. Had thyroxine (manufactured by a high grade druggist) been fed him in infancy, his features might now be classic.
The variety of endocrine effects is endless. Sunday newspaper supplements portray them as marvels. The cinema assembled specimens for a film called Freaks. Physiologists constantly search for new hormones. Biochemists strive to analyze their structure, hoping eventually to make them artificially. The subject fills 20 volumes of the German Handbuch der inneren Sekretion, edited by Berlin's Professor Max Hirsch, whom Hitlerites have ousted for being a Jew.
The foremost U. S. compendium on the glands and their secretions is the late Professor William Engelbach's Endocrine Medicine. It consists of three volumes of text and one index volume (1,800 pp.), was published last year by Charles C. Thomas of Springfield. Ill., costs $35. Shortly after its publication Professor Engelbach, an ill, harried St. Louis practitioner who had vainly sought peace in Santa Barbara and in Manhattan, died.
New researches since Dr. Engelbach wrote Endocrine Medicine already warrant a supplementary volume. Last year, for example. Dr. Harvey Gushing (for whom Yale last week created a special professorship of neurology) presented a new disorder, "Cushing's disease." The face, neck and torso of the victim suddenly become fat. The arms and legs remain normal. Round-shoulders develop, accompanied by backache. Men become impotent. Women cease to menstruate. The skin becomes dusky. Professor Gushing, brain surgeon, found the cause to be an overgrowth of certain (basophilic) pituitary cells.
And, in Milwaukee, last fortnight: