Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850-1950
Less than a century ago, physicians, scientists, and cultural commentators became fascinated by the endocrine glands and the effects of their secretions on our bodies and minds. Of all the characteristics supposed to be governed by them, the attributes of sex evoked the wildest interest. The gonads, it was revealed, secreted chemicals that not only influenced the biological expressions of sex, but seemed to generate the vitality and energy that made life worth living.\ \ Through a...
Search in google:
Less than a century ago, physicians, scientists, and cultural commentators became fascinated by the endocrine glands and the effects of their secretions on our bodies and minds. Of all the characteristics supposed to be governed by them, the attributes of sex evoked the wildest interest. The gonads, it was revealed, secreted chemicals that not only influenced the biological expressions of sex, but seemed to generate the vitality and energy that made life worth living.Through a series of case studies drawn from Central Europe, the United States, and Britain, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life explores how the notion of sex hormones enabled scientists to remap the human body, encouraging hopes that glandular interventions could cure ills, malfunctions, and even social deviance in ways inconceivable to previous generations. Many of these dreams failed, but their history, Chandak Sengoopta shows, takes us into the very heart of scientific medicine, revealing how even its most arcane concerns are shaped by cultural preoccupations and anxieties.Offering a painstakingly researched and absorbing account of a century of glandular and hormone research, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life will be heralded as a major achievement by scholars working on the history of medicine and its influence on modern ideas of the body, sexuality, and gender. British Journal for the History of Science "Sengoopta's superb integration of sources from physiology, gynaecology and literary fiction illustrates how social and scientific temptations shaped endocrinology."— Cheryl Logan
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Gonads before the Endocrine Era 2. The Age of the Internal Secretions 3. Sexuality, Aging, and the Gonads: New Physiology and Old Values 4. Ending Gonadal Hegemony: Sex and the Endocrine Orchestra 5. The New Hormones in the Clinic Epilogue: The Gonads, the Brain, and the Neurohumoral Body Notes Index
\ British Journal for the History of Science"Sengoopta's superb integration of sources from physiology, gynaecology and literary fiction illustrates how social and scientific temptations shaped endocrinology."\ — Cheryl Logan\ \ \ \ \ \ Science"Examining a century's scientific and popular fascination with endocrine glands and their effects on the body, Sengoopta . . . . concludes that in the end, it was all about sex. . . . This focus on sex allows Sengoopta to follow multiple historical relationships, particularly those between clinicians and basic scientists and between biomedicine and the wide popular culture."—Cheryl Logan, Science\ — Sandra Eder\ \ \ \ Times Higher Education Supplement"It is easy to write interestingly about sex, harder to be scholarly about this fascinating subject, and hardest of all to be both scholarly and interesting. Chandak Sengoopta has achieved this last feat. The Most Secret Quintessence of Life is a major contribution to the history of sexuality and its medical investigation during the formative period of what is now the thoroughly respectable medical speciality of endocrinology. . . . This fine monograph is cultural history of medicine at its best."--W. F. Bynum, Times Higher Education Supplement\ — W. F. Bynum\ \ \
