ROMANCE OF MODERN MEDICINE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIII, Issue 283, 15 November 1923, Page 4

ROMANCE OF MODERN MEDICINE

In his address to the students of the winter medical schools in London Dr. Hunter, consulting physician to the Charing Cross Hospital, dealt at some length with what he called the romance of present day medical studies. Ho said that the amount of knowledge

which the medical student'had now. to acquire was stupendous. It was ten times greater, in relation to every subject of the students’ studies, than it had been twenty years ago. That the student survived was due largely to the romance of those studies—the variety of the forces and weapons of defence marshalled by science against disease, and the still more wonderful variety of forces and weapons which the human body itself marshalled in its own defence. A series of remarkable advances ’recently made in the field of physiology, he said, had discovered entirely new facts with regard to the functions of the various organs ol the body, which made medical studies more romantic still. These advances revealed th© great part played by internal secretions of practically all organs' and tissues in determining the growth and functional activity of the body. Various ductless glands whose functions had been a mystery, and also other glands, like the pancreas and the ovaries, produced internal secretions of; th© most potent character, mutually affecting one another’s activities, nutrition. and growth, their absence causing in some cases new and striking forms of disease as well as well-known diseases. As with bacteriology, so here, in the study of the glands, new measures of treatment were promptly devised based on those resjiits. The active principles of these organs were isolated, and. most recently, th© active agent of the pancreas, termed “insulin,” recently introduced against dialietes—the administration of these agents had the most remarkable results in controlling or arresting the several diseases produced by their absence Like the unknown forces underlying the physical phenomena of wireless telegraphy, those internal secretions or hormones, as they were called, permeated the whole bodily mechanism, and influenoed its activities—tissues calling to one another like deep unto deep. Their presence or absence affected even the evolutionary development of the body.