Volume 1

The internal secretions and the principles of medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous.

  • Charles E. de M. Sajous
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The internal secretions and the principles of medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/884 page 13
    overlooked the cardinal functions of the organs to which I have given special attention: the adrenals, the thyroid, the pituit¬ ary body and the leucocytes. As the text will show, various branches of biology have been studied, but many of the facts which have served to elucidate function were obtained from clinical medicine. A great physiologist, Professor Pawlow, of St. Petersburg, wrote a few years ago,21 after stating that physicians had pointed out the existence of gastric secretory nerves—a question which, I may add, has been greatly elucidated, thanks to his own labors: “Physiologists, on the other hand, had fruitlessly en¬ deavored for decades to arrive at definite results upon this question. This is a striking, but by no means isolated, instance where the physician gives a more certain verdict concerning physiological processes than the physiologist himself; nor is it indeed strange. The world of pathological phenomena is noth¬ ing but an endless series of the most different and unusual combinations of physiological occurrences which never make their appearance in the normal course of life. It is a series of physiological experiments which Nature and life institute, often with such an interlinking of events as could never enter into the mind of the present-day physiologist, and which could scarcely be called into existence by means of the technical re¬ sources at our command. Clinical observation will consequently always remain a rich mine of physiological facts/' There are precedents, therefore, upon which a legitimate belief may be based that the conclusions I have reached are sound. They afford, moreover, a clear explanation of the inability of physi¬ ologists to discern the functions my researches have led me to discover: they are partly hidden in a field that physiologists could not legitimately be expected to scrutinize, owing to its vastness. In this connection, it is mainly, therefore, as a contribution of pathological biology to normal biology, of which physiology is a subdivision, that the two volumes of “Internal Secretions are offered. Among the more important features which the views I advance therein appear to me to point out for the first time
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3