Stimuli that Release Hormones of the Pars Nervosa

Abstract

Forty years on, it is difficult to remember and feel again accurately what it was like in those faraway days of personal ignorance when one was young, newly graduated, and beginning a career in research. Perhaps the effort to remember is comparable with trying to return to the feelings of the first days at boarding school when one was another person in another world. Here follows a summary of my road to neuroendocrinology. It was at the age of about 11 that I decided to become a doctor. None of the family were medical and I have no idea what decided me except an overpowering curiosity in all aspects of living. From the first I was encouraged by an uncle in whose family I was brought up. (My father worked in India so I was left at “home.”) A year or so later I decided I wanted to do research, knowing no more about it than that it was a seeking for the why and how. In this ambition I received stimulation of a sort from a family friend, Sir Cooper Perry, who at the time was Superintendent of Guy’s Hospital and later became Principal of the University of London. On being told I wanted to do research he said, “Don’t think of it. Women are no use at that kind of thing.” I said nothing, thought a great deal, and was more than ever determined! When the time came to leave school, there was some opposition to the idea of medicine but physiology was acceptable. This gave me a taste for the subject.