Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/537

Rh gastric, renal, uterine, seminal, etc. All this undoubtedly influenced Bichat in the fundamental error of his scientific work, viz., the ascription of specific vital property to each classifiable tissue. Bordeu's slender reputation to-day is concentered in a single idea—the doctrine that not only each gland, but each organ of the body, is the workshop of specific substance or secretion which passes into the blood, and that upon these secretions the physiological integration of the body, as a whole, depends. This doctrine is contained in his "Analyse medicinale du sang" (1776), the importance of which has been signalized by the eminent medical historian, Professor Max Neuburger, of Vienna. An examination of this work will hardly realize the expectations which are raised by Professor Neuburger's panegyric. It is a typical example of the purely theoretical reasoning so common in the medical literature of the eighteenth century, in which an intolerable deal of verbiage is spread over the smallest substructure of fact. Cases are frequently cited but they are not true clinical delineations, only gossipy personal anecdotes, not unlike those of Brantôme. A great deal is said about the sexual side of man, and indeed the most interesting part of Bordeu's theory is his observation of the effects of the testicular and ovarian secretions upon the organism. He regarded the sexual secretions as giving "a male (or female) tonality" to the organism, "setting the seal upon the animalism of the individual," and as a special stimulus to the human machine (novum quoddam impetum faciens). He described in detail, the secondary sexual changes, not only in eunuchs and capons, but also in spayed animals of the female sex. In connecting all this with specific secretions, discharged, not externally, but into the blood, Bordeu was, as Neuburger rightly contends, very close upon the modern theory of the internal secretions, but, as he made no experiments, his ideas can only be regarded as an interesting phase of eighteenth-century theorizing. Aside from Bordeu's deduction from what he saw, almost any stock-raiser or poultry-fancier might have noted the same facts, and facts of equal moment had been noticed long before his time.

To begin with, one of the oldest therapeutic notions is the idea that such unsavory materials as the viscera or excreta of animals, administered either singly or as a maximum compositum might avail in the treatment of disease. This mode of therapy was a common feature of the Egyptian medical papyri, was known to the Greeks and Romans, made great headway during the dark ages, and reached its height in the seventeenth century. The four London Pharmacopœias of 1618, 1650, 1677 and 1721 abound with such remedies as the bile, blood, bones, brains, claws, eggs, excrement, eyes, fat, feathers, hearts, horns, intestines, marrow, milk, omentum, placenta, rennet, sexual organs, skin, teeth and urine of all manner of animals; also bee-glue, civet, cock's comb, coral, crayfish,