THE NEW SURGERY

Evening Star, Issue 20139, 2 April 1929, Page 10

THE NEW SURGERY

DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE PITUITARY CLAUD

Physiology is not yet an exact science. Year by year its students and research workers, plying their skill with an amazing diligence and daring candour, mi fold fresh marvels to an interested and admiring public. This is an ago of glands. Comparatively few years ago the world was startled by the work of Voronoff on the thyroid glands of animals and their application to human surgery. Now even Voronoff has become a conversational commonplace, and the man in the street can discourse knowingly on the functions of the thyroid and its contribution to man’s bodily energy and muscular power. But there are human glands which have still greater mysteries to reveal, and amongst them is one whose influence on our bodily destiny is perhaps greater than all the rest. In size no larger than a cherry, and seated at almost the exact centre of the human head, it is named the pituitary gland, long known to anatomists, but never understood. Its activity determines _ the _ size of the human body, its maturity, it ability to throw off germ infectious, and many other features of physical and mental personality. The pituitary gland, says Professor N. B. Taylor, of tho University of Toronto, ought to bo the bodily organ most thanked by proprietors of circuses, inasmuch as the familiar figures of tho sawdust ring—the giant, the fat lady, and tho dwarfs and midgets—are each and all products of pituitary disturbances. Science lias still to learn much more of the gland’s action, states Professor Taylor, in the ‘ Scientific Monthly,’ and doubtless the origins of many human abnormalities, good and bad, will be discovered. Once there was a group of scientists who deemed it the seat of the soul. But this was merely an unfounded guess suggested by the mere presence of the gland and the fact that nobody could think of any duty it might perforin. Compared with the tear glands of the eyes or the saliva glands of the mouth, its functions were a mystery. But the pituitary belongs to a different class, known as tho “ductless” group. Like the thyroid and adrenal gland, with their respective influences on muscular energy and physical courage, its secretions do not pass out of the body, but into the blood, and it is precisely for this reason that, in common with this “ductless” group, its activities-are so important. DWARFS OR GIANTS?

A delicate operation on tho pituitary gland done by removing a plug of bone from the skull base through the top of the nose has shown that cases of enlargement of tho facial bones known as acromegaly, when not too far gone, can he improved, or even cured. But just how so small a gland could cause such alarming abnormalities in human nature has until recently been a complete mystery. It was not known that such things as tho Widening of the face are the work not of the whole gland, but of only a part of it. The ordinary pituitary gland taken from a human being or an animal is composed of two parts, a front and a back lobe, and according to certain anatomists there is a third organ in the gland, a kind of intermediate part sandwiched in between the two Jobes. Very recently two physicians of the University of California, Dr A. M. Evans and Dr Miriam E. Simpson, have proved that two entirely different kinds of living cells exist in the front lobe of the

organ, previously supposed to contain only one kind of tissue. Microscopic inspection shows them to _ have not merely different chemical effects in absorbing various dyes, but also to have profoundly distinct and conflicting Influences on tho body. This conflict, so these physicians believe, determines the instant at which a young woman, an adolescent, stops growing and begins to assume the attributes of masculine or feminine maturity. A virtual struggle takes place in the very centre of tho human head to decide the stature of tho individual and bis_ oilier adaptability to tho ordeals of existence. Disturbances in the front lobe of this gland are also responsible for such phenomena as bone enlargement and the face widening, known as acromegaly, which, if begun in childhood, affects all the bones and produces the gigantic type. , Commenting on the work of these two American physicians tho “’Now York American,’ in the course of an article from which many interesting statements are made, says they also explain other disorders of growth and maturity which tho pituitary gland can produce. For example, in tho front lobe of the gland of the two kinds of cells which exist one kind begins to develop first, beginning in infancy, perhaps even before birth, and these first growing cells appear to stimulate growth in their own way. Fortunately, however, Nature works by a system of checks and balances, and such tendencies as the boneenlarging activity of tho one kind of cells are limited by the operation of the other. Tho latter, by some power they possess on reaching their full growth, put an end to the activity of the earlydeveloped cells. Having checked bodily growth, they enable adolescent man or woman to assimilate the various bodily changes of voice and other characteristics which accompany maturity of stature. DARING EXPERIMENTS.

The fluctuations of growth at this stage of adolescence, and the tendencies towards gigantic or dwarfish abnormality arc plausibly explained in these experiments on the pituitary gland. But more important still, from a surgical point of view, is the hope held out by these experments of being able to control such bodily disorders by extracting and feeding the chemical produced by the proper set of cells. A similarity exists between these cells and their chemical products throughout the entire animal kingdom of mammals. Not long ago the University of California sent an expedition to secure the pituitary glands of the largest mammals, the whales, so that more of these materials could he extracted from their comparatively largo glands. Thus the mind conjures up visions of a surgery that may not only ho able to prolong human energy indefinitely, but may also fashion man in an ideal image and proportion. Speculation is rife concerning the function of the back lobe of the pituitary gland. Apparently the view is taken that it deals with the utilisation of food in the body, for the disease of this lobe is apt to produce abnormalities of the “fat hoy” type, a_condition sometimes outgrown as the individual grows older. The intermediate tissue between the two lobes of the gland has been the subject of more interesting suggestions from Dr Charles E. De M, Sajous, an eminent gland student of the University of Pennsylvania. He believes that in the course of evolution of life from its early marine state this intermediate part of the pituitary glaml'niay bo descended from the nose-like organ of primitive water animals to tost the purity of Alio water in which they

moved. Evolutionists believe that mail still lives in a fluid corresponding to the water of the ancient sea. That fluid is tho blood, and Dr Sajous suggests that one duty otpthis part of the gland is to test from instant to instant tho purity of the blood that is flowing through it, and to give the alarm if this blood shows signs of anything wrong. Should a germ invade the body, and its blood, for example, this portion of the gland detects the poison, and issues orders mobilising tho body’s germ defences, such as are manifested in fever, as lever is now considered by physicians to be a remedial process begun by the body itself as one means of cooking out the invading germs.