Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/542

538 Hospital, London. In the history of medicine, this work was destined to have an immortality of its own. In the very opening lines of his preface, Addison clearly states, for the first time, the true paths by which, as subsequent experience has proved, the problems of these mysterious glandular structures have been best approached and attacked:

Tbus did Addison set forth the fact that Nature herself is sometimes the physiologist's best vivisector, even as Billroth and the followers of Marion Sims elucidated the pathology of the abdominal and pelvic viscera by making "autopsies in vivo."

On March 15, 1849, Addison read a paper before the South London Medical Society in which he described the symptoms of what is now styled pernicious anasmia, cases in which the whole surface of the body "bear some resemblance to a bad wax figure." Only three of the cases came to autopsy, but "in all of them was found a diseased condition' of the supra-renal capsules." Was this a mere coincidence? Addison inquires.

Making every allowance for the bias and prejudice inseparable from the hope or vanity of an original discovery, he confessed he felt it very difficult to be persuaded that it was so. On the contrary, he could not help entertaining a very strong impression that these hitherto mysterious bodies—the supra-renal capsules—may be either directly or indirectly concerned in sanguification; and that a diseased condition of them, functional or structural, may interfere with