Sir Walter Langdon-Brown and hormonology at the RSM

Professor Hadden (July 2005 JRSM¹), citing Hunting's The History of the Royal Society of Medicine,² claims that the RSM's Section of Endocrinology, constituted in 1945, was the brainchild of Dr Raymond Greene. This is at variance with what the endocrinologist Dr S L Simpson added to the obituary of Sir Walter Langdon-Brown in the BMJ³ in 1946 in writing that he was the moving spirit in the initiation of the Section, with his inaugural address ‘The birth of modern endocrinology’⁴ characteristically invigorating and creative.

Sir Walter, born in 1870, consulting physician to St Bartholomew's Hospital and Regius Professor of Physic, University of Cambridge, 1932-1935, was president of three sections of the RSM—those of Urology, Therapeutics and Pharmacology, and History of Medicine—before becoming first president of the Section of Endocrinology. His book The Endocrines in General Medicine⁵ (1927) later gave rise to the claim that he could be regarded as the founder of modern clinical endocrinology in this country. In his Horsley Memorial Lecture⁶ on ‘The integration of the endocrine system’ in 1935, he remembered as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1892 the excitement of hearing Victor Horsley give a paper on the function of the thyroid gland. It was in this lecture that Langdon-Brown famously named the pituitary gland as the leader of the endocrine orchestra, something he modified in his last (inaugural) lecture at the RSM by recognizing ‘that the hypothalamus holds the still more important rank of conductor’.