ABSTRACT
Introduction The Roman anatomist Bartholomaeus Eustachius first described the adrenal glands in 1552 in his Opuscula Anatomica, referring to them as ‘glandulae renibus incumbentes’ (glands lying on the kidneys). The function of the adrenal glands, however, remained a mystery to workers for 300 years, until in 1856 the French physiologist Charles Brown-Séquard demonstrated that these glands were essential to life in a series of experiments on dogs and rats. Brown-Séquard had been inspired by a report the previous year by Thomas Addison of London describing the clinical findings of 11 patients in whom the adrenal glands had been found at postmortem to be destroyed, through either tuberculosis or cancer (a condition later termed Addison disease).
