Senescence, the Last Half of LifeHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Senescence, the Last Half of Life
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Geriatrics
nutrition or preservation of the spermogenetic function. He thinks “we
run more risk of failure of the implant from the greater traumatization
of the tissue necessary for anastomosis.” He thinks, too, that the
spermogenetic epithelium of the testes degenerates in all cases rather
promptly.[189]
In his book, _Impotence, Sterility and Sex Gland Implantation_ (1917),
which seems somewhat ill-digested, Lydston claims priority on eight
points and formulates twenty-one conclusions. It seems to me that
he has not sufficiently assimilated the best European work in this
field or profited as much as he might have done by the far greater
refinements of technique of Steinach; while such results as he claims
are, as he himself admits, always wide open to criticism.
* * * * *
Serge Voronoff, like Metchnikoff, combines research with humanism
and gives free rein to his idealism. He is professor in the medical
school of the _Collège de France_ and deals with old age and death
from the standpoint of endocrinology or the study of the glands of
internal secretion. Accepting Weismann’s doctrine of the continuity
of germ plasm, he says that the nameless and ever unassuaged horror
that everybody really feels for death is “because an intimate memory
of our immortality” survives or because we recollect creation’s first
intention as expressed in plasmal immortality. Man has inherited
this longing from the deathless unicellular creatures from which he
descended not only in the form of quests for elixirs of life here but
in all his manifold beliefs of a life beyond the grave, at the same
time for this life accepting the gospel of renunciation to death as
something inevitable. The ghastly thought of death not only clouds all
our life but predisposes even most scientists to think that research in
this field cannot be successful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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