If one wishes to trace the idea of internal secretion by cells to an individual, it is convenient, if not pedantic, to give the credit to Theophile de Bordeu, a famous physician of Paris in the eighteenth century.  Bordeu came to Paris as a brilliant provincial in his early twenties and by the charm of his manner and daring therapy fought his way to the most exclusive aristocratic practice of the court.  Naturally a courtier, taking to the intrigues of the royal court like a duck to water, making enemies on every hand as well as friends, and with a fastidious and impatient clientele, he yet found time to dabble in the wonders of the newly perfected microscope and to speculate upon the meaning of the novelties revealed by it in the tissues. He coined the thought of a gland secretion into the blood.

It was in the year 1749 that he came to Paris from the Pyrenees, a young medical graduate, destined to become the most fashionable practitioner of his time.  At the age of twenty-three he was holding the professorship of anatomy at his alma mater, Montpelier, where his father was a successful physician.  At twenty-five he was elected corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences.  A handsome presence and a Tartarin de Tarascon disposition assured his success from the start.  The medical world was then composed of the emulsion of charlatanry and science Moliere ridiculed.  Success stimulated envy and jealousy.  One of the richest of the older medical men set himself the job of procuring his scalp.  On a trumped-up charge of stealing jewels from a dead patient—­a favorite accusation against the doctors of the eighteenth century—­he had Bordeu’s license taken away from him.  The good graces of certain women to whom Bordeu had always appealed, and who indeed supplied the funds to get him started in Paris, rammed through two acts of Parliament to reinstate him.  Nothing daunted, he returned to his quest for a court clientele, and was rewarded finally by having the moribund Louis XV as a patient.

This was the man with whom the modern history of the internal secretions begins.  Not content with adventures among the courtiers and desperadoes of the most corrupt court in the most corrupt city of the world, he went in for research.  The high power microscope that came into vogue when he was studying, revealed vague wonders which he described in a monograph, “Researches into the mucous tissues or cellular organs.”  But what makes him interesting is a slender volume on the “Medical Analysis of the Blood,” published in the year of the American Declaration of Independence.  The sexual side of men and women aroused Bordeu’s most ardent enthusiasms.  Starting with observations on the characters of eunuchs and capons, as well as spayed female animals, he formulated a conception of sexual secretions absorbed into the blood, settling the male or female tint of the organism and setting the seal upon the destiny of the individual.  Thus he must be donated the credit of anticipating the most modern doctrine on the subject.