1. A. S. Parkes, ?The Rise of Reproductive Endocrinology, 1926?1940?, J. Endocrinol., 34, (1966), xx-xxxii; idem, Sex, Science and Society: Addresses, Lectures and Articles (Newcastle upon Tyne: Oriel Press, 1966). In these works Parkes recounts the background to the now-classic discoveries of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The present paper explores the scientific issues that made the problem of reproduction interesting to investigators prior to that period and indicates the social context in which such inquiries were promoted in Britain and the United States.
2. Merriley Borell, ?Brown-Séquard's Organotherapy and Its Appearance in America at the End of the Nineteenth Century,? Bull. Hist. Med., 50 (1976), pp. 309?320.
3. Merriley Borell, ?Organotherapy, British Physiology and Discovery of the Internal Secretions,? J. Hist. Biol., 9 (1976), 235?268.
4. Merriley Borell, ?Origins of the Hormone Concept: Internal Secretions and Physiological Research, 1889?1905,? (Ph. D. Diss., Yale University, 1976). See pp. 24?57 for a detailed discussion of the response to the new therapeutics. By the early 1890s, extirpation experiments had suggested a relation between myxedema, cretinism, and disordered thyroid function, diabetes and pancreatic dysfunction, and Addison's disease and adrenal pathology. When successfully employed as therapeutic agents, organ extracts provided one means of confirming these relationships. In the specific case of gonadal extracts, Brown-Séquard had cited (in a report published in 1893) cures or ameliorations of the following diseases via testicular extract: locomotor ataxia, sclerosis of the spinal cord, pulmonary tuberculosis, cancer, paralysis agitans, sugar diabetes, polyuria, anemia, asthenia, arteriosclerosis, sclerosis of the heart, albuminuria, various types of paralysis, neuritis, gangrene, Addison's disease, exophthalmic goiter, fibrous tumors, debilities due to age, influenza, hysteria, chorea, neuralgia, migraine, certain forms of rheumatism, gout, malaria, and neurasthenia. See [C.-E.] Brown-Séquard and [A.] d'Arsonval, ?Effets physiologiques et thérapeutiques d'un liquide extrait de la gland sexuelle mâle,? Comp. Rend. Acad. Sci., 116 (1893), 856?861. Subsequent clinical reports conflicted and were difficult to evaluate. Physiologists especially did not consider them reliable. A number of nervous disorders like hysteria and neurasthenia, soon to be absorbed by psychoanalytic theory, appeared to respond to any new therapeutic regimen introduced by the hopeful practitioner. Moreover, the specific agents of many of the infectious diseases had not yet been identified, and some of these conditions also seemed to respond to extracts. As the infectious agents were discovered, the cures by testicular extract were called into question.
5. On the professionalization of physiology see Joseph Schiller, ?Physiology's Struggle for Independence in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,? Hist. Sci., 7 (1968), 64?89, as well as Gerald Geison, ?Social and Institutional Factors in the Stagnancy of English Physiology, 1840?1870,? Bull. Hist. Med., 46 (1972), 30?58.