Hormones: Looking at How the Messengers in Our Bodies were Discovered

Hormones, a word familiar to teenagers, youths, and adults alike. We hear it in classrooms, medical clinics, and in the realm of science. But this intricate system governing our bodies through chemical messengers was not always common knowledge. In this exploration, we embark on a journey to unravel the fascinating history of hormones.

In the 1700s, we knew that the spleen and thyroids dumped chemicals into the blood to modify bloods but we didn't see any of those as being related to hormones. Before the knowledge of hormone existence, scientist thought that the only the body could communicate with itself was through the nervous system and while we saw certain hormone glands like the testes and ovaries, scientist didn't really know what they were about but this changed with Dr Arnold Berthold.

pressbooks.ccconline.org

The turning point in hormone discovery came in 1848, courtesy of Dr. Arnold Berthold. Intrigued by the notion that testicular secretions had significant effects, he conducted a groundbreaking experiment using roosters. In a curious experiment, he paired roosters and took a variety of surgical measures on their testicles. These roosters' lives were about to take an unexpected turn.

In other to get this, he took 6 roosters and out them in pairs of 2 making a group of 3. In the first group he cut out one of the rooster's testicles, in the second, he removed both testicles, and the third group, he removed both testicles but inserted one of them in the other's belly between the intestines. I could imagine what could be running through the minds of those roosters, they be like cock-a-doodle-do (i don't know the meaning but that's their signature sound).

After a while Dr Berthold started to notice some behavioral changes with the roosters with no testicles getting fat and lazy with lower energy, while the roosters with one testicles did not get fat and lazy. Before the removal of the testicles, they were all active and agile. He began to notice that the group with one testicles had it become swollen possible to make up for the missing one but was active. The ones with testicles in their stomach behave pretty like the one testicle group.

He decided to test this with different bird and he got the same result either when the testicles were in a different place or not. When he cut opened the birds that he had inserted the testicles to, there were no new attachment to them which could show that they were being connected to help perform the function that was needed by the body, Since there were no connection between the testicles and the body, he came to a conclusion that the testicles secreted something to the bloodstream, and its secretion were necessary for the normal expression of aggressive behavior.

commons.wikimedia.org

In the same era, significant progress was made in endocrinology, the study of hormones. Surgeon Thomas Blizzard Curling conducted an autopsy on two obese girls with mental disabilities, revealing the absence of thyroids. A procedure known as thyroidectomy, removal of the thyroid, was relatively common during the 1800s, but its purpose remained uncertain. This revelation raised questions about the thyroid's role in the body and its impact on overall health.

While the thyroid was removed, there wasn't a certain purpose for it but then they noticed that people who had their thyroids had similar symptoms with the patient from Thomas Blizzard and they decided to investigate the thyroid. William Bayliss and Ernest Starling began to work on vagus nerve and its association with the pancreas including in dogs. They detached the nerves near the gut in dog, and realized that the pancreas still secreted its juice. This was they knew hormones, where they said that a chemical had to be secreted by a gland travel through through the bloodstream and affect other body part. They worked on the pituitary, adrenal, thymus, thyroid and the pancreas, and came to a conclusion that they were glands to secrete the chemical hormones.

Hervey Cushing, a pioneering neurosurgeon, left an indelible mark on the study of hormones. With his unique ability to access the brain through neurosurgery, Cushing probed the brain's role in hormonal control. He sought to understand if the brain communicated with other body parts through hormones. His focal point was the pituitary gland, situated within the brain.

With endocrinology, accessing the glands was easy with the thyroid gland hanging a little under a little bit of skin in the neck, the adrenal gland sit on kidneys, the testes hang beneath the genitals but the pituitary is in the brain. He was able to see that the pituitary had two lobes which were the anterior and posterior lobe.

He noticed that his dogs would die when he removed the anterior lobe of the pituitary but survived when he removed the posterior only. He also noticed that when he fed the anterior pituitary to his dogs, they were looking malnurished, while when he fed the posterior pituitary to his dogs, he found swollen kidneys and elevated blood pressure. He also experimented using cattle pituitary and fed them to human dwarfs with the hope that they would grow but they didn't grow.

Hormones have emerged as vital components of our intricate biological machinery and the world of medicine. They wield immense power, orchestrating a symphony of physiological responses that govern our well-being.

---

---

Refernce

---

---

https://books.google.com.ng/books?
https://academic-accelerator.com/encyclopedia/brown-dog-affair
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1168922/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2954190/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC558482/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3046198/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3031643/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5606407/
https://thejns.org/focus/view/journals/neurosurg-focus/41/1/article-pE6.xml