The Goat-gland Transplantation: As Originated and Successfully Performed by J. R. Brinkley, M. D., of Milford, Kansas, U. S. A., in Over 600 Operations Upon Men and WomenFlower, Sydney Blanshard
History
The Goat-gland Transplantation: As Originated and Successfully Performed by J. R. Brinkley, M. D., of Milford, Kansas, U. S. A., in Over 600 Operations Upon Men and Women
Flower, Sydney Blanshard
Brinkley, John Richard, 1885-1942; Transplantation of organs, tissues, etc.
The intention in offering for your perusal the preceding newspaper
accounts of Dr. Brinkley's work in the opening months of the year 1920
was to show you what his views at that time were regarding the value of
the gland operation which he has since made his life-work. The Chicago
Tribune speaks of it as incidental to his general work as a surgeon. Dr.
Brinkley himself speaks of shortly beginning an experiment upon an old
man of 80. A year later he looked back upon a record of achievement of
the most astounding results in operations performed upon men of 75, 80,
and even 81. During this past year he has perfected his technique,
implants the male glands exclusively into men and the female glands or
ovaries into women, and has definitely selected the scrotum of the man
as the only right place in which to introduce the goat-glands for the
transplantation. You are here viewing the development of a great
scientific discovery from the beginning of its employment upon human
beings. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the year 1922 will
produce no embellishment of value in the form of a wider application of
the method. Some very striking limitations have been established during
the past year's work. For instance:
If the blood examination shows a positive Wasserman test for syphilis it
is useless to transplant the glands, because they will certainly slough
out. Active syphilis is antagonistic to the goat-tissue. Even latent
syphilis, showing a negative Wasserman, is likely to produce a slough of
the glands. Nothing should be concealed from the doctor, of course, and
yet it has happened at the hospital at Milford that a patient on being
questioned in advance of the operation has emphatically stated that he
had never contracted syphilis, and three days later, after the
transplantation, when the sloughing of the new glands had shown
something definitely wrong with the blood, this patient admitted that he
had not spoken the truth in the matter, but had contracted the disease
many years previously. On the other hand, in Locomoter Ataxia, in which
there is invariably a history of syphilis, the goat-glands take hold
without exception, the efficacy of the transplantation in this disease,
hitherto incurable by any means known to man, being due to the power of
the new glands to cause a dissolving of scar-tissue, in the opinion of
Dr. Abrams of San Francisco, who investigated the remarkable results
attained by Dr. Brinkley in his cures of Locomoter Ataxia by the
goat-gland operation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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