MEDIEVAL PREPARATIONS OF URINARY STEROID HORMONES

Introduction OUR knowledge of the endocrine functions of the sexual organs of man and mammals is an acquisition of comparatively recent date. Endocrinology as a whole indeed does not go back beyond the beginning of the present century. By the end of the twenties a great deal of important knowledge about the endocrine secretions of the testis and ovary, the placenta and the adrenals had been attained, as may be seen in the collective work Sex and Internal Secretions, edited by Edgar Allen i 1932. The sme period had seen the establishment of the correct formula of the steroid ring system by Wieland, Windaus, Diels, Bernal, Rosenheim and King; and this opened the way for the sweeping advances in the field of androgens and oestrogens which have taken place since then.* We are now familiar with a large number of substances of androgenic and oestrogenic activity naturally occurring in the body, and we are also able to make use of derivatives of these substances which do not naturally occur in Nature but which may have very useful properties for our purposes. Since the knowledge of the steroid sex hormones is thus such a characteristic achievement ofmodern science, it seems hardly believable that in any phase of ancient or medieval science it should have been possible to make preparations which possessed activity of this kind. Nevertheless, we have recently come upon a corpus ofmaterial which indicates that this was accomplished by the Chinese iatro-chemists between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries A.D. Guided by theories of traditional Chinese type, not of course the same as those of modern science, and using urine as their starting-point, they succeeded in preparing mixtures ofandrogens and oestrogens in relatively purified form and employing them in medicine. The classical discovery ofAschheim & Zondek in 1927 that pregnancy urine contains rich amounts ofsteroid sex hormones,t and the subsequent discoveries of the presence of similar substances in urine from other sources, was thus anticipated by many centuries in these Chinese empirical preparations. In the present paper we wish to set forth the evidence which we have found.+~