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Introduction: The Heart of the Matter

Fay Bound Alberti

in Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the emotional significance of the heart, both physically and spiritually. It examines the symbolism of the heart during ... More

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the emotional significance of the heart, both physically and spiritually. It examines the symbolism of the heart during the 17th century, the nervous physiology of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the emergence of modern understandings of the influence of the nervous system and of the mind-body relation. This book also explores the emergence of hormones an explanatory category for the emotional symbolism of the heart.Less

“The Billionaire’s Last Will”: Hormones and Institutions

Nikolai Krementsov

in Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction

This chapter focuses on actual and fictional experiments with hormones which both scientists and writers saw as a powerful tool for manipulating the shape and functioning of the human body. It ... More

This chapter focuses on actual and fictional experiments with hormones which both scientists and writers saw as a powerful tool for manipulating the shape and functioning of the human body. It demonstrates that, for scientists, hormones also become a convenient instrument for influencing their Bolshevik patrons, notably the head of Narkomzdrav Nikolai Semashko. It documents the joint efforts—and different goals—of scientists and their patrons in conducting a different kind of experiment: building large institutional structures for a new biomedical discipline, endocrinology. It analyses tactics and strategies employed by the veterinarian Iakov Tobolkin and the eminent internist Vasilii Shervinskii in creating an Institute of Experimental Endocrinology in Moscow. It shows that although the transformative power of hormones over human body and personality did fire up writers’ imagination, the institutional embodiment of that power completely eluded their attention.Less

A New Molecular Science of Sex

Sarah S. Richardson

in Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome

A direct intellectual and institutional context for the development of the sex chromosome concept during the period from 1915 through 1930 was the concurrent and spectacular development of sex ... More

A direct intellectual and institutional context for the development of the sex chromosome concept during the period from 1915 through 1930 was the concurrent and spectacular development of sex hormone research. With its rich resources, medical applications, and powerful institutional platform, the new molecular biology of sex drew the X and Y chromosomes into its center of gravity and folded them into the thick scientific account of sex it purported to offer. Through this process, the sex chromosomes began to take on firmer form in both popular and scientific understanding. Sex chromosomes began to emerge from the shadow of the sex hormones in the 1950s and 1960s, when the X and Y debuted in human genetics. Through widely publicized and sometimes sensational scientific discoveries about human sex chromosome anomalies such as Klinefelter and Turner syndromes, the sex chromosomes moved to the fore as the central pillars of the human sex binary.Less

“A sort of animal or mechanic immortality”: Glands and Eugenics

in Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain

This chapter shifts the attention from robots to real men, revealing how hormones were first envisaged as being able to improve male sexual performance and then extended to the notion of generally ... More

This chapter shifts the attention from robots to real men, revealing how hormones were first envisaged as being able to improve male sexual performance and then extended to the notion of generally promoting social efficiency. This would include their employment to enforce or restore sexual “normality.” The efficacy and morality of exploiting ductless glands for sexual and social purposes are explored. The most significant impact of the early research on the internal secretions was in reformulating discussions of sex and gender. Researchers claimed that hormones would make women better wives and mothers. The moral of both The Cheetah Girl and the Lili Elbe story seemed to be that women could be created. The discovery of hormones had recast eugenics. Rejuvenation, eugenics, and endocrinology were each in their own ways symptoms of the twentieth-century desire to enhance the body.Less

The Biochemistry of Life

Mark Jackson

in The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability

The relationship between adaptation and disease was initially explained primarily in terms of the function or malfunction of the autonomic nervous system. However, during the middle decades of the ... More

The relationship between adaptation and disease was initially explained primarily in terms of the function or malfunction of the autonomic nervous system. However, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, scientific debates about adaptation and stress became increasingly inflected by the language and methods of endocrinology rather than neurology or psychology. The research of Selye and others, which focused on the relationship between the hypothalamus, pituitary gland and the adrenal cortex in mediating chronic stress reactions, was mobilised by military authorities and clinicians eager to identify the biochemical pathways and physiological processes involved in determining the symptoms and signs of physical and psychological disease. Chapter Three analyses not only the manner in which scientists and clinicians were increasingly explaining health and disease, and indeed the mysteries and meaning of life itself, in terms of the maintenance or disruption of hormonal and biochemical balance in the face of stress, but also the depth and impact of contemporary preoccupations with equilibrium, control and social progress.Less

The Whole on the Verge of Collapse: Physiology’s Test

Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers

in The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War

Chapter 1 begins at a moment of transformation in the field of experimental human physiology that fomented a deep and unequivocal move to a focus on system-wide functions of the human organism. The ... More

Chapter 1 begins at a moment of transformation in the field of experimental human physiology that fomented a deep and unequivocal move to a focus on system-wide functions of the human organism. The confluence of the use of X-Rays, a shift from animal to human models in the wake of the anti-vivisection movement, and the attention to chemical reactions beyond the specific organ together opened the human body to a set questions about its wholeness and its curious capacity to endure, and sometimes not. In this chapter we consider the question of how “integrative” approaches were obscured in histories of physiology, first by their own authors’ fear of being designated as holistic romantics, and second, by the ways in which they came to be taken up by other scientists without the overall theoretical systems becoming part and parcel of mainstream biology and physiology. The chapter introduces a group of actors––medical thinkers, researchers, clinicians––who guided conceptualizations of the human body from physiology through various fields of medicine, including endocrinology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neurology.Less

Endocrino-Chakric Machine: Hormonized Humors and Organotherapy

Projit Bihari Mukharji

in Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences

Organotherapy, viz. the practice of injecting the crushed essences of animal organs into humans, is the technology around which this chapter is organized. The practice of organotherapy was enormously ... More

Organotherapy, viz. the practice of injecting the crushed essences of animal organs into humans, is the technology around which this chapter is organized. The practice of organotherapy was enormously popular when it first arose and eventually led to the discovery of hormones and the endocrinal system. These developments initiated a radical reorientation within modern Ayurveda away from electromagnetic theories towards hormonal theories. It also led to the incorporation of the yogic idea of chakras into modern Ayurveda. This also meant that the undifferentiated internal space that had been imagined under the influence of electromagnetic ideas now dotted with chakras as control centres which controlled hormonal flows.Less

Introduction to Part Four

Elizabeth A. Williams

in Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950

The Introduction to Part IV (Chapters 10-12) sets the context for the biomedical study of appetite in the years 1900-1950. Despite sweeping changes in food production, distribution, and consumption, ... More

The Introduction to Part IV (Chapters 10-12) sets the context for the biomedical study of appetite in the years 1900-1950. Despite sweeping changes in food production, distribution, and consumption, research on appetite largely disregarded quotidian realities of human eating. Instead, laboratories served as privileged sites for investigating appetite, with laboratory animals supplying models for human eating. Researchers in the emergent field of ethology contested the dominance of the laboratory, but the experimental setting remained preeminent given the high value placed on precise measurement. With the spread of scientific medicine, physicians, who had long defended individual appetite, increasingly recast clinical observations of appetite and eating in light of claims about the governance of ingestion by hormones, specific brain-sites, or chemical constituents of nutrients. Practitioners concerned for the “whole person” worked to develop a psychosomatic approach to troubled appetite, but they remained divided over the relative importance of psychic and somatic factors. Overall, researchers attempted to define appetite as a concrete object of science, as when the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov equated appetite with gastric secretion. But by 1950 most researchers concentrated on measurable “food intake” or sought strictly operational approaches to appetite as an admittedly ambiguous phenomenon.Less