Senescence, the Last Half of LifeHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Senescence, the Last Half of Life
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Geriatrics
improvement took place. The ape is, in a sense, however, superior to
man, as represented by the quality of these organs, owing perhaps to a
more robust physical constitution; or it may be due to the fact that
with the first boy the graft was from a young ape and the latter from
his mature mother.
For woman, for whom old age has perhaps even greater terrors than for
man, such restoration has not yet been made. Indeed, ovariotomy has
less effects upon young women than does castration upon man, so that
here we face a new problem that cannot yet be solved. The problem now
is whether we can generalize yet from these special studies, including
bone grafting and the surgery of transplantation of other organs.
Kidney grafting has been successful as yet only on cats and dogs but
opotherapy or the administration of glandular extracts of animals when
our own fail is in its infancy, although it does seem to give promise
of deferring death and increasing the vigor of human life. Indeed, he
thinks that the renewal of worn-out glandular mechanisms by grafting
may even become a commonplace. The vital fluid supplied by these organs
“restores energy in all cells and spreads happiness and a feeling
of well-being and the plenitude of life throughout our organism.”
The idea of controlling this marvelous force and placing it at our
service when the natural sources of our energy begin to dry up with the
advance of age has long haunted the minds of investigators, and Paul
Bert and Ollier decades ago dreamed of a day when old organs might be
set aside like worn-out clothes and replaced by new ones. “Several of
these animals operated upon have exceeded the age limit which animals
of their species generally attain and, instead of showing signs of
decrepitude and senility, they give promise of astonishing vigor.”
Louis Berman, M.D.,[191] tells us that infancy is the epoch of the
thymus, childhood of the pineal, adolescence of whatever gland is
left in control as the result of the life struggle, and senility is
the epoch of gradual endocrine insufficiency. The discovery of the
effects of endocrine secretions he compares with that of radium and
thinks that by control of this function we may be able to modify the
rigidity of Weismann’s dogma and affect heredity itself. He draws a
very long bow and even attempts to characterize important personages
and races according to the predominance of thyroid, pituitary, or
adrenal secretions and sees here the fundamental determinants of human
character and conduct. Well informed and expert as he is in this field,
his views, though bold and interesting, are, it must be admitted, more
or less speculative in the present state of our knowledge, and he
devotes little consideration to old age or to the methods of deferring
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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