r under
the guidance of self-control, or surgically safeguarded against the
waste of excess, should not function at their best for fifty years of
added life, with very possibly another fifty added to that. The real
crux of the matter is the resistive quality of tissue, which is
approximately 200 years for such organs as kidneys and heart, and, say,
150 for nerve-substance.

[Illustration: THE OPERATING ROOM AT THE BRINKLEY HOSPITAL]

CHAPTER VIII

A WEEK AT DR. BRINKLEY'S HOSPITAL

The writer, approaching the age of 54, and finding himself in
first-class physical and mental condition, except for a high blood
pressure, which was certainly the prelude to a later arterio-sclerosis,
decided that he would be doing himself a service, and put himself in a
better position to write with some authority upon the effects of the
goat-glands, if he took the operation.

On Saturday, April 16. 1921, Dr. Brinkley operated on him at the
hospital, Milford, Kansas, transplanting the glands of a three-weeks old
male goat. He remained in bed Saturday and Sunday, got up and went for
an auto drive on Monday, and passed an uneventful week at the hospital,
returning to Chicago on Saturday. He experienced a marked increase in
mental energy, which might have shown itself also as increased physical
energy if it had been put to the test. This feeling of added pep, snap,
energy, or what you please to call it, could be psychological in its
origin if it were not for the fact that it is continuous, with no
set-backs. Every student of psychology is aware that auto-suggestion has
the power to bring out latent energy, raise the drooping spirits, and
generate a feeling of well-being. But the student, if he is a reasonably
close observer, is also aware that these improved states of feeling have
an annoying habit of being offset by corresponding periods of
depression, and though he may persist in his effort to lift himself out
of the black moods with such success that he finally arrives at a higher
tone-level mentally, with a corresponding physical improvement, there is
indubitably a strong sense of effort needed for this good result. When,
therefore, the writer finds himself working long hours day after day
with no sense of mental fatigue, but a certain unusual gaiety of heart
accompanying the successive days, as if life were on the whole rather a
lark, he, being accurately introspective, and not easily deceived into
optimistic conclusions, is