"Injection dans le sang d'extraits liquides du pancréas du foie,…

"Injection dans le sang d'extraits liquides du pancréas du foie, du cerveau et de quelques autres organes" [with] "Faits montrant combien est grande et variée l'influence du système nerveux sur la nutrition et les sécrétions"

Paris: G, Masson, 1892, 1891. Two extracts from ARCHIVES DE PHYSIOLOGIE NORMALE ET PATHOLOGIQUE, both edited by Brown-Séquard. Octavo, pp 10, [2]; 747-61, sewn in light green wrappers of the periodical. The first paper is number 4 of the Oct., 1891, issue, and the second paper is number 1 of the Jan., 1891, issue. Both issues have the bookplate of Prince Roland Bonaparte (1858-1924) tipped inside the front cover, as well as ink notes that they were received from the author 21 Feb, 1892. There is also a small gilt bordered paper label with an "L" affixed to the lower inner corner of the front covers. Both issues have nicks to fore edges but are otherwise VG+. The second pamphlet, "Faits montrant..." has a printed label with the title pasted on the front cover. It's title continues "Influence curative du liquide testiculaire dans un grand nombre d'affections locales ou générales, organiques ou fonctionnelles." The last page, the beginning text of another article I expect, has a sheet of blank paper pasted over it.>>>"Brown-Sequard: An Improbable Genius Who Transformed Medicine traces the strange career of an eccentric, restless, widely admired, nineteenth-century physician-scientist who eventually came to be scorned by antivivisectionists for his work on animals, by churchgoers who believed that he encouraged licentious behavior, and by other scientists for his unorthodox views and for claims that, in fact, he never made. An improbable genius whose colorful life was characterized by dramatic reversals of fortune, he was a founder-physician of England's premier neurological hospital and held important professorships in America and France. Brown-Sequard identified the sensory pathways in the spinal cord and emphasized functional processes in the integrative actions of the nervous system, thereby anticipating modern concepts of how the brain operates. He also discovered the function of the nerves that supply the blood vessels and thereby control their caliber, and the associated reflexes that adjust the circulation to bodily needs. He was the first to show that the adrenal glands are essential to life and suggested that other organs have internal secretions. He injected himself with ground-up animal testicles, claiming an invigorating effect, and this approach led to the development of modern hormone replacement therapy. Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard was reportedly 'one of the greatest discover of facts that the world has ever seen'. It has also been suggested that 'if his reasoning power had equaled his power of observation he might have done for physiology what Newton did for physics.' In fact, scientific advances in the years since his death have provided increasing support for many of his once-ridiculed beliefs." - blurb for Michael J. Aminoff's Brown-Sequard: An Improbable Genius Who Transformed Medicine (Oxford 2010). Brown-Séquard was born in Mauritius to an American father and French mother. He studied in Paris and taught in America (Medical College of Virginia, Harvard), London, and Paris. He was the originator of the theory that eating monkey glands (testes) could make you virile (not true), but it was enough to "sufficient to set the field of endocrinology off and running." - John C.M. Brust. "Brown-Séquard was a keen observer and experimentalist. He contributed largely to our knowledge of the blood and animal heat, as well as many facts of the highest importance on the nervous system. He was the first scientist to work out the physiology of the spinal cord, demonstrating that the decussation of the fibres carrying pain and temperature sensation occurs in the cord itself. His name was immortalized in the history of medicine with the description of a syndrome which bears his name (Brown-Séquard syndrome) due to the hemisection of the spinal cord, which he described after observing accidental injury of the spinal cord in farmers cutting sugar cane in Mauritius. Far more important is that he was one of the first to postulate the existence of substances, now known as hormones, secreted into the bloodstream to affect distant organs. In particular, he demonstrated (in 1856) that removal of the adrenal glands resulted in death, due to lack of essential hormones. At age 72, at a meeting of the Societie de Biologie in Paris, Brown-Séquard reported that hypodermic injection of a fluid prepared from the testicles of guinea pigs and dogs leads to rejuvenation and prolonged human life. It was known, among scientists, derisively, as the Brown-Séquard Elixir. Brown-Séquard's research, published in about 500 essays and papers, especially in the Archives de Physiologie, which he helped to found in 1868 along with Jean-Martin Charcot and Alfred Vulpian, cover a very wide range of physiological and pathological subjects." - Wikipedia.

Book ID: 43341
Tags: Medicine, Welland
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