The Birth Of The Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex And Launched A Revolution - Plot & Excerpts
THE HISTORY OF endocrinology might be said to have begun on February 8, 1849, at a meeting of the Royal Scientific Society in Göttingen, Germany. It was there that the scientist Arnold Berthold told his assembled colleagues about an unusual experiment in which he had castrated six young roosters. Without their testes, Berthold found, the roosters quit crowing. They also gave up trying to mate with females and stopped fighting with males. They seemed to lose the very essence of what made them roosters. After observing these changes, Berthold replanted the testes in some of the birds. Suddenly, their combs and wattles grew back. They started crowing, fighting, and trying to mate. The results suggested to Berthold that within the testes of the rooster there must be some substance being released into the blood that affected behavior and body functions. Forty years later, in 1889, an eccentric seventy-two-year-old French scientist named Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard had much the same notion.
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