Historical Tidbit: Téophile de Bordeu (1722-1776)
Submitted by Alan Rogol, MD
Incretory Activity and the Foundations of Endocrinology
Théophile de Bordeu, a physician at the Court of Louis XV, brought forward a theory of incretory (internal secretory) activity. In 1776 in Analyse Médicinale du Sang (The Medical Analysis of the Blood) he hypothesized that all organs secrete substances into the blood that regulate bodily processes. He had no idea of endocrine organs or feedback loops! He specifically postulated that the testis, in addition to making sperm, also produced an internal secretion later shown to be testosterone that gave vitality (his words in translation “male tonality to the organism”); all based on observations of capons and eunuchs. Pity that he was not an experimentalist almost 75 years before Berthold’s experiments with testis transplantation in capons (1849).