of a gland with a true internal
secretion and the power it exercised through the blood upon the
entire organism. Besides, he showed that a typical gland of external
secretion could also have an internal secretion, a possibility never
before considered. That two kinds of cells could live within the same
gland: one set usually recognized as producing the external secretion,
the other evolving the internal secretion, was an astounding original
conception.

ENTER CLAUDE BERNARD

Science is supposed to be immune to the personal prejudices and
emotional habits of the vulgar. It is the tradition that a new
contribution to knowledge emerging from no matter how obscure the
source, should be hailed as a gift from the gods. But the sad truth of
the matter is that a new finding in science requires as much backing
as a new project in high finance or social climbing. Berthold, like
Mendel, the founder of genetics, was a great pioneer. But there was no
personage, no person of consequence, with no patronage by anyone of
consequence, no wife or kin, to push him, and no audience to stimulate
him. His poor four little pages of a report, published ten years
before Darwin's "Origin of Species," attracted not the slightest
notice. Buried in the print of a journal with a subscription list of
possibly two or three hundred, of whom perhaps two dozen may have been
interested enough to read it, but without any recorded reaction on the
part of any of them, it was a flash in the pan. Though it was good,
original, conclusive stuff, it was cut dead, absolutely, by the
scientific world. As a result, forty years elapsed before the
implications of his studies were rediscovered by the Columbus of the
modern approach to the internal secretions, the American Frenchman,
Brown-Sequard.

It took a first class man of genius in his field, in Paris, with a
respected position in the whirl of its medical planetary system and
a university appointment, to boom and advertise the doctrine of the
internal secretions, so that people began to sit up and listen and
take sides--on the wrong grounds. This Frenchman was Claude Bernard.
At a series of lectures on experimental physiology delivered at the
College of France, in 1855, he coined the terms internal secretion and
external secretion and emphasized the opposition between them, on the
basis of an incorrect example, the function of the liver in the supply
of sugar to the blood.

Just as Columbus reached America,