In the eighties, there came to the clinic of Pierre Marie in Paris, a pupil of the great Charcot, various women complaining of headache.  They also told him about an enlargement of their hands and feet, and an alarming change in the bones of the face.  He differentiated the affection from its imitators, and created its present designation of “acromegaly” (enlargement of the extremities).  Also he correlated their relationship to the giants who have been mentioned.  Acromegalics have been also likened to the Neanderthal Man, who had probably, as the gorillas may have, an excess of the pituitary in their systems.  For four years he studied the morbid phenomena in the tissues of these sufferers at last consigned to their end.  First one, and then another, and then a third and a fourth exhibited a striking hypertrophy of the pituitary body and a consequent widening of the portion of the base of the skull which cradles the gland.  He proceeded to say so in the graduating thesis of his pupil, Souza Leite.  The inference was inevitable that the entire process was to be put down to an overactivity of the pituitary.  Ever since, too, the growth of the skeleton has been accepted as controlled by that gland.

About this time another set of old observations came to life again, related to those of Docent Berthold on the auto-grafting of the testes of a cock, with complete retention of its sexual characters, which he said, must be due “to the productive action of the testes, i.e., to its effect upon the blood, and thence to the corresponding effect of such blood upon the entire organism.”  Of course, stock raisers and poultry fanciers have noted the interesting outcome of castration for about as long as their professions have existed.  And for ages the diminution of sexual activity as a predecessor to the decadence of senility has been harped upon.  Rejuvenation, especially in connection with sexual activity, as well as with tissue and spiritual elasticity, has been one of the haunting phantoms of the imagination for as long as we have records of articulate humanity.  Together with El Dorado, the Elixir of Youth has shared the honors with the Philosopher’s Stone.  The idea of employing the chemical materials of the sex glands, the testes or the ovaries, to bring back youth, to restore juvenility, had not, as far as we know, occurred to anyone who at any rate put himself on record, by word or deed, until 1889.  The hero of the new departure was the hero of so many daring adventures among speculative experiments, Brown-Sequard.

At this time the wanderer was an aged sage, seventy-two years old, fit, as custom goes, only for retirement and resignation to the fate of all flesh.  The old passion of experimenting upon himself as well as upon the guinea-pigs, dogs, cats and monkeys, by which he was always surrounded, was as alive and kicking as ever.  I suppose he had been thinking for years concerning some method for the resumption of youth,