There is something spectacularly mysterious and picturesque about most of the malign, insidious effects of the disease which appealed at once to a number of investigators.  The most adventurous, the most daring, the most imbued with enthusiasm for the experimental method, was the American Frenchman, Brown-Sequard, who is acknowledged the father of modern knowledge of the glands of internal secretion, though to Claude Bernard belong the honors of the grandfather.

BROWN-SEQUARD THE GREAT

Brown-Sequard, as the outstanding figure in the history of the glands of internal secretion, deserves some notice as a personality.  In the words of the note-makers for novels and plays, he was a card.  He was born in 1817 at Port-Louis, on the island of Mauritius, off Africa, then French property.  His father was a Mr. Brown, an American sea captain; his mother a Mme. Sequard, a Frenchwoman.  Early in childhood, the father sailed away on one of his voyages and never came back.  The mother thereafter supported herself and her son sewing embroideries.  At fifteen, Brown-Sequard, with the physical appearance of an Indian Creole, was clerking in a colonial store by day, and composing poetry, romances and plays by night.  The call of Paris was in his blood, which was indeed a supersaturated solution of wanderlust.

Soon he was landed there to make his fortune in literature, only too speedily to be disillusioned.  Exhibition of manuscripts to a leading literary light merely evoked curt advice to learn a trade or go into business.  He would have none of either and studied medicine instead, earning his way by teaching as he learned.  In the laboratories, he made the acquaintance of people who more than once were to be his salvation in the ups and downs of his career.  In 1848 he was one of the secretaries of the Society of Biology, newly founded by Claude Bernard.

Some trouble, perhaps some effect upon his health of cholera which then swept Paris, caused him to return to his native Mauritius, to encounter an epidemic of cholera.  There he slaved manfully, for which a gold medal was afterward struck for him.  That over with, he embarked in 1852 for New York, without a word of American, learning English on board.  This was the first of a series of voyages.  As he often boasted, he crossed the ocean sixty times, not a bad record for the days when the Mauretania was still in the womb of time.  He made a hopeless failure out of practice in New York, became so poor as to practice obstetrics at five dollars a case, and married a niece of Daniel Webster.  Then he went back to Paris.  Back to America next as Professor of Physiology at the University of Richmond, Virginia, a job occupied for a few months only because of his opinions on slavery, ostensibly anyhow.