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-Séquard.

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, carried on a series of logical
syllogisms, built upon unreal pictures of a straight path to the East,
Claude Bernard opened up the continent of the internal secretions to
the experimental enthusiasts of his time by a discovery which today
is not grouped among the phenomena of internal secretion at all. In
attempting to throw light upon the disease diabetes, in which there
is a loss of the normal ability of the cells to burn up sugar, he
examined the sugar content of the blood in different regions of the
body. He found that the blood of the veins, in general, contained less
sugar than the blood of the arteries, which meant that sugar was taken
from the blood in passing through the tissues. But the venous blood of
the right side of the heart contained as much sugar as the arterial
blood. Evidently, somewhere, sugar was added to the blood in the veins