The internal secretions and the nervous system / by M. Laignel-Lavastine.

  • Laignel-Lavastine, M. (Maxime), 1875-1953.
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The internal secretions and the nervous system / by M. Laignel-Lavastine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    20/82 (page 2)
    the vegetative system, the same individual presenting at intervals of some days different reactions, and adrenalin glycosuria has no value until the hepatic element is eliminated. Finally I wish to state that the term tonic or tone does not seem to me well chosen, because it deals more with an exaggeration of the excitability of the nerve rather than an increase of its tonicity, | and these two states are far from being always parallel. Be that as it may, I differentiate in nervous disorders in addition to sensory-motor troubles and psychoses, the disorders of the vege- tative system, and these sympathetic and autonomic abnormalities. We shall see later on that these disorders do not separate them- selves into parallel series as simply as the theory would have them do. Then again many trophic disorders observed in endocrine syn- dromes are not actually trophoneuroses. It seems quite often that endocrine commotions reécho on the morphology through a humoral intermediary and not through a nervous one. Nevertheless, as I can not dissociate in the actual enumeration of the trophic dis- orders those that have a nervous intermediary from those that have none, I will discuss them all, later on indicating how they may be distinguished. Commotions of the internal secretions should include the dis- turbances of all the internal secretions, that is to say, all humoral pathology not to say all the pathology, because every cell from a cytological standpoint is a gland of internal secretion, and following Renault, who showed the secretory value of the cells of the con- junctive, Nageotte, just recently by mitochondrial methods, has demonstrated the secretion of the neuroglia, which was thought formerly to be a simple tissue of support. In order to be brief, and admitting the three distinctive condi- tions, histological, chemical and physiological, of the glands of in- ternal secretion, claimed by Gley*® at the recent Congress of London, I will only picture among the internal secretions those that depend upon definite glands, in the front ranks of which I will place the classical hemato-vascular glands: thyroid, parathyroids, pituitary, suprarenals, ovaries and testicles. I will add to this group the pineal, which in the infant, histo- logically as well as physiologically, is an endocrine gland; the choroid plexus, of which the secretion diffused in the cerebro-spinal fluid has been demonstrated by Pettit and Girard; the prostate, whose 14a See Translation of Achucarro, Jl. Nervous and Mental Disease, Oct., 1016, D. 333: 15 E, Gley, Relat. entre les organes à sécrétion int. et les troubles de ces sécrét., Rapport, sect. de Physiol., Congrès internat., Londres, 1913.