In 1891, a British doctor named George Murray took a 46-year-old woman dying of myxedema, the end stage of severe hypothyroidism, and reversed it by injecting her with an extract of sheep thyroid. She lived another 28 years on that treatment and died in 1919 of an unrelated heart condition. (PMID21205773) We're going to spend the next 90 days on why that first bridge connecting the ancestral to modern biocehmical evolution wasn't a fluke, and how it might shape the way you look at food and the concept of nutrients. The whole series will rest on one idea -> Eating a specific organ can support that same organ in your own body aka Like supports like. While most have come to file it under superstition, it's the principle medicine was built on, before it learned to isolate the active molecules and sell them one at a time, as we're starting to see again with modern peptides. Through the 1880s, surgeons removing the thyroid to treat goiter kept producing the same disaster: patients developing full myxedema(severe hypothyroidism) afterward. By the time Murray took his patient, the field already accepted that myxedema was the thyroid going missing. His move was to run that backwards. If losing the gland causes the disease, supplying what the gland makes should reverse it. There was no synthetic thyroid hormone to reach for, thyroxine wouldn't be isolated until 1915, so he prepared an extract from fresh sheep thyroid and injected it under her skin. Within months she was unrecognizable from the patient who walked in. In 1920 Murray published the full life-history of that first patient. Over 28 years she moved from injections to oral thyroid extract, went through the equivalent of around 870 sheep's worth, stayed well the entire time, and died in old age of heart failure rather than the disease. Within a year, Hector Mackenzie showed that feeding fresh thyroid by mouth worked as well as injecting it. The organ could just be eaten, and a failing human organ recovered on the strength of an animal one. That practice has a name: organotherapy, treating a human organ with preparations of the matching animal organ. Endocrinology grew directly out of it. The historian Merriley Borell traced how British physiologists took these crude glandular results and built the entire concept of internal secretions, which is to say hormones. (PMID11610067) The thyroid is the cleanest example there is: a clear deficiency, a clear replacement, a durable result, documented for 28 years. But it get's far more nuanced. There are strong arguments for the hormones t1, t2, t3, and t4 being the reasoning behind this particular organs success, not some unknown signaling mechanism. The imprecise nature and 1000s of anecdotes using raw glandular, which have very small amounts of these hormones when compared to pharmaceutically concentrated forms, lends credence to further exploration. Not every organ has this much data and evidence to dig through, but over the next thirteen weeks, we'll dive into all the ones that do and which are still phenomenological. We're starting here because the cleanest case is also the oldest, and it has been sitting inside the origin story of endocrinology for 130 years. The thing now dismissed as folk medicine is the same thing that produced thyroid hormone, insulin, and the whole concept of a hormone. We're going to walk you through every aspect of the research, including clinical data, signature data, current peptide sciences, and the studies we have invested in heavily to solidify all this work. By the end of this series, you will thoroughly understand the power foods contain beyond their basic vitamins and minerals and get access to never-before-seen studies; not hyperbole, we discovered studies that were buried in old libraries across the world that were never uploaded to the internet. Stay Tuned!