Chapter IX
Reading edition
SUMMARY
Dr. Brinkley’s employment of the goat-glands for the past three years of continuous operating, therefore, has proved to his satisfaction and to that of his patients that the testes in men and the ovaries in women furnish a secretion which has the property of a revivifying fluid when restored to the system by the currents of blood and lymph. In that commonly fatal condition of the arteries which follows rapidly upon the state of blood pressure known as hardening of the arteries, or arterio-sclerosis, a practically incurable condition hitherto, the results obtained by the goat-gland transplantation are miraculously swift. When the arteries are, as the doctor puts it, “as hard as pipe-stems,” they grow in a few weeks, sometimes in a week, soft and pliable. The change, according to Dr. Brinkley, is brought about in the walls of the arteries themselves, and is not a process of dissolving the accumulations or deposits of calcareous material within the arteries. The change is in the material of the walls of the arteries, producing a return of the condition of elasticity, permitting expansion and contraction as in youth.
It is a favorite theory with some modern writers that the physical change from youth to age is accompanied in the body, and in a sense caused by, the deterioration in the quality of
A much more reasonable and probably true explanation of the cause of old age is the gradual disappearance of animal matter in the bones and tissues, and the corresponding increase of the mineral matter in the bones and tissues, amounting to ossification of cartilage, whereby the supple cartilage, losing its animal content, becomes practically bone by deposit of lime particles. This would also account in a common-sense manner for the fragility of the bones of the aged, the brittleness being due to calcareous deposits in the substance of the bone itself, in excess of the normal mineral contents of the bones in youth. The function of the seminal fluids, therefore, appears to be to restore to the aging tissues this property, this animal matter, which when in its right ratio and proportion in the cells of the organism produces the condition of youth. The action of these seminal fluids, therefore, seems to be two-fold, a dissolving and a nourishing. The distinction should be clearly made that the action is NOT merely stimulating. The stimulation of a nerve-cell is a temporary excitement. We speak of the stimulation of alcohol, and this illustration gives a clearer view of the difference between the nourishing action of the seminal fluids and a stimulating action than we could obtain by the employment of many words. It is interesting to remember that while it is possible to increase the mineral particles of soda, potash, lime, iron,