Everyone should read this book. It's a pretty wild ride from our first observations that nerves don't do all the communicating in the body through folly and happy accidents to controversies of modern hormonal medicines. It is intense, but fascinating from beginning to end. This book not only has the factual, and frankly amazing, timeline of the human understanding of hormones but keeps intact the sexism, racism and hubris rife in the medical community.
This book is a journey that begins with doctors and surgeons unanimously declaring they had solved all anatomy problems by discovering the nerves and the rest was only minor details, thorough rooster castration and reinstallation of testes elsewhere in the body to the brown dog affair (spoiler alert: they used to dissect dogs alive to show how the nerves work because, despite knowing the nerves transmitted pain, somehow never dawned on people that these dogs were in excruciating pain being fileted alive). Then the book travels through a few of the major players and their lives like Dr. Harvey Cushing and his brain collection to Dr. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow and her unwillingness to quit due to pregnancy leading to her jokes about having a 8.5 pound 5-month-old fetus. Starting with the horror of brain spongiform disease acquired from pituitary gland injections to make short children taller to political arguments about using hormone blockers at the onset of puberty for trans children. This book brings to life a seemingly boring topic in a way I've rarely seen before and I highly recommend it for anyone with a curious mind.
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