Abstract

IT IS a great disappointment to me to miss this meeting of The Endocrine Society and I deeply regret that I am unable to greet each of you personally tonight.

My 42 years with the Society, 25 of them serving as your Secretary-Treasurer, have been rich and rewarding, affording me friendship with some of the truly great pioneers in the field of endocrinology, namely, Roy Hoskins, Frank Pottenger, Edward Kendall, Hans Lisser and many others.

May 31, 1889 is sometimes cited as the birthday of Endocrinology. On that date Brown-Sequard, a French physiologist and one-time professor at Harvard, still eager to pursue his researches, but at 72 chafing under his infirmities, proceeded to inject himself with a watery mixture of testis juice and blood from a spermatic vein in an attempt to rejuvenate his waning mental and physical powers. He claimed success for a while, but this was more probably due to the stimulus of having a very attractive blonde assistant than to any somatic effect of the injection. Pathetically, however, he failed to find the “Fountain of Youth.”

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