The Endocrine Hypothalamus: An Historical Review

Abstract

The history of the hypothalamus and neuroendocrinology is so intimately related to the development of our ideas on the disease known as diabetes insipidus, that any discussion of the one must include a discussion of the other. Many authors have compared the history of diabetes insipidus to a comedy of errors. Indeed, the whole problem seems to have fared rather badly from the very beginning when Magnus and Schafer (1901), and Schafer and Herring (1905) demonstrated that extracts of the posterior lobe of the pituitary body had a diuretic effect rather than the antidiuretic effect as we know it today. Furthermore, from a histological point of view, Herring (1908) and later Cushing (1933) were of the opinion that the cellular constituents of the posterior lobe were incapable of secreting the active factors attributed to that lobe and that consequently a search had to be made elsewhere for the secretory cells. Herring (1913) visualized the secreting cells as coming from the pars intermedia and migrating into the pars nervosa where they degenerated and released the “hormones”. Cushing (1933) fully subscribed to this and in 1933 stated rather emphatically that “it is scarcely conceivable that the neural core of the lobe is capable independently of elaborating a hormone.”