Brown-Séquard, neurologist and father of endocrinology

Thomas Addison in 1855 described anaemia, general languor and debility, and a peculiar change of the colour in the skin in connexion with a diseased condition of the suprarenal capsules. But his famous monograph, did not mention a secretory role or vital humoral factor stemming from the adrenals. When the peripatetic experimental neurologist Brown-Séquard published (in1856) the results of his first experiments on the suprarenal glands it was not known that any of the vascular glands had a secretory function. He showed that animals dying from the absence in the blood of the secretion of those glands (after they had been removed) could be revived when they received an injection of a liquid extracted from healthy suprarenal capsules [glands]. Thus it was a neurologist Brown-Séquard who had established the essential secretory role of a glandular structure, the scientific foundation of endocrinology. Later, in 1902 Bayliss and Starling discovered secretin and introduced the word hormone.