Glands

The most fertile branch of Medicine today is the study of the body's glands and the chemicals called hormones which those glands manufacture and distribute through the body.

The pituitary seems to be the most important gland in the body. It is a reddish-grey oval mass the size of a hazel nut, and lies in a bony case at the base of the brain. Apparently the pituitary keeps all the other glands teamed up. (The thyroid keeps them steamed up.) If the pituitary gland does not supply the secretions which the body needs, doctors in some cases can remedy the deficiency by administering manufactured extracts. In case of too much ''secretion, extracts of other glands restrain the overactive pituitary. Sometimes a brain surgeon can cut out a piece of the gland and thus reduce its output.

Generally accredited as the nation's foremost investigator of pituitary hormones and functions is Dr. Herbert McLean Evans. 50. big. shy, ever-investigating professor of biology in the University of California and director of its Institute of Experimental Biology at Berkeley. Professor Evans was the first deliberately to make giants by injecting normal animals with pituitary growth hormones. He was also first to discover Vitamin E, which is necessary for reproduction in higher animals. The past year he has been laboring, with no letup, at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. This week he and Mrs. Evans left Manhattan for Berkeley with a ninth, tenth, and perhaps an eleventh pituitary hormone which he and helpers have isolated.

One of these is an adrenalotropic hormone. When the pituitary gland fails to send enough adrenalotropic substance through the blood, then another set of glands, the adrenals, which are essential to life, wastes away. But the exact relation of hormones of the two glands is not yet clear.

Another hormone discovered by Dr. Evans is diabetogenic. Contrary to insulin, this pituitary factor causes the body to accumulate sugar.

A last new hormone of the pituitary, possibly identified by Dr. Evans, apparently magnifies the effect of one of the female sex hormones and seems to have a sex-stimulating effect of its own.

But the pituitary gland, of which Dr. Evans is the master, is only one of nine organs positively known to secrete hormones. Of these organs, the stomach, intestine and pancreas are not ''ductless glands." "Ductless glands" are the pituitary, the thyroid and the parathyroids (they lie in the neck), the adrenals (one rests on each kidney), the ovaries and the testes, all of which came in for attention fortnight ago at the meeting of the American Medical Association in Milwaukee.*

It is already clearly established that the proportion of hormones manufactured and distributed by the ductless glands determines the varying nature of the various bodies, minds and temperaments which various humans have.

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:

Johns Hopkins' Professor Dean DeWitt Lewis, who is the new A. M. A. president, said that he hunts for a tumor of the parathyroid when he gets a case of bone cyst. The cysts "develop and the bones get softer and shorter because the diseased parathyroid cannot produce enough hormones to hold calcium in the bones. Surgeon Lewis cuts out the parathyroid tumors, cures his patients.

Drs. Max Ballin and PI inn F. Morse of Detroit look at more than the para-thyroids when bones go wrong. The thyroid is frequently involved in cases of arthritis, although its main influence is in a general weakening of the bones without localizing the trouble. Disease of the pancreas or of the adrenals may also affect the bones. They mentioned a man who broke a leg while sneezing. Autopsy showed a diseased pancreas and a parathyroid tumor.

The pancreas, an adjunct to the bowels, produces insulin whose dramatic influence on diabetes matches the dramatic effect of iodine on goitre. When the pancreas is inactive or diseased it produces too little insulin for the system. Hence diabetes. Too active a pancreas produces too much insulin, causes an opposite disease called hyperinsulinism. or ''hungry disease." Dr. Scale Harris of Birmingham, who has studied this phenomenon for ten years, described the symptoms as excessive hunger accompanied by weakness, nervousness, tremors, sweating and mental lapses. Many a person considered to be an epileptic actually suffers only from "hunger disease," said Dr. Harris. Only positive way to diagnose hunger disease is to find abnormally little sugar in the blood. Most important cause of the hyperinsulinism is an inflamed pancreas. Careful adherence to a diet low in starches and sugars and high in fats will control mild cases. In more severe cases, as in severe goitres, a surgeon must remove part of the gland. Pancreatic surgery is much more difficult than thyroid surgery.

A newly discovered function of the adrenals which Columbia University's Professor Raymund Lull Zwemer recognizes, is the regulation of salt and water in the body. This power resembles the power of insulin on sugar, the parathyroid on calcium, the thyroid on iodine. Common salt benefits cases of Addison's disease, a disease caused by defective adrenals.

The thyroid received little attention at last fortnight's meetings, apparently because its physiology is broadly understood and because the number of goitre cases in the country is shrinking (TIME. May 29). Nor did the sex glands per se come up for much discussion. The pituitary predominated over all.

*Other organs which probably secrete hormones: pineal (in the brain), thymus (back of the collar bone), liver, heart, spleen.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.