Читать книгу Old Age Deferred. The causes of old age and its postponement by hygienic and therapeutic measures онлайн

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As, however, in these days of scepticism we do not believe in anything until demonstrated by experiments (often forgetting the fact that what does for dogs or rabbits does not always do for man) which should only assist our judgment, but not exclusively govern it, we shall have to prove the correctness of our clinical observations on the influence of the sexual glands—i.e., on the nervous system and mentality—by experiment, and we believe we have sufficient facts at hand to do so.

About a hundred years ago it was shown by Gall—who was attacked by several authors, among them Rieger, as innovations always are, but who was also successfully defended by the celebrated German nerve specialist and philosopher, Moebius^[93]—that castrated animals or persons have an alteration in the back part of the skull indicating an impoverishment of the cerebellum. And, indeed, he produces his own evidence and that of several other authorities, Darnecy, Rousseau, etc., which gives the history of several autopsies on castrated persons, all of whom showed an atrophy of this structure. In cases where only one of the testicles was destroyed, this atrophy was always present in the hemisphere of the small brain on the opposite side.