Comic Book Diagnosis: The Glands Have It!

April 9th, 2008

Filed under: Medicine

Medications extracted from animal glands were once the mainstay of therapy for certain conditions. Hypothyroidism (low thyroid) was treated with Armour Thyroid, a medication derived from pig thyroids (and that’s Armour as in “Hot Dogs, Armour Hot Dogs…”). Diabetes was treated with insulin obtained from the glands of cows and pigs. There were problems with these medications: they were hard to dose correctly, nasty allergic reactions could occur, and you never knew how pure the source was — how do you know your insulin wasn’t made from a cow with BSE (Mad Cow Disease)?

These animal-gland derived medications have been almost entirely supplanted by synthetically produced thyroid hormone and insulin. There are still some patients who are resistant to changing over to the newer medications — generally because they feel that it is the only drug that works for them, or that the older medications are more “natural” — but they don’t always have a choice: Armour Thyroid is still available in the United States, but bovine and porcine insulin have been off the market for years.

Comic books take the concept of medication derived from animal glands and raise it to the next level. The rewards are greater — generally super powers of some kind — but the risks are also that much higher.

Take Kirk Langstrom: he developed a serum made from bat glands so that he could develop super-hearing and echolocation just like a bat. The serum worked, but too well: he gained painfully acute hearing. But that’s not all that happened: his bat gland serum also transformed into the bestial Man-Bat — half bat and half man.

Scene from Man-Bat #1 (2006 series)Cover, Man-bat #1 (1996 series)

For another example, we head back to 1953. In this pre-code horror story (titled appropriately enough “The Monkey Glands”), a ne’er do well brother is determined to outlive his elder brother so that he can inherit the family fortune. Having heard that an extract of monkey glands can restore youth, he acquires a pair of monkeys and obtains the serum. He injects the solution, and sure enough, his wrinkles fade and he gains that youthful glow. Unfortunately, a short time later…well, just look for yourself (and I highly suggest you check out the full story over at The Horrors of it All).

scene from The Monkey GlandsScene from The Monkey Glandsscene from The Monkey Glands

Overall, it seems that there are 5 Steps to Developing and Using a Comic Book Animal Gland Serum:
1. Obtain the desired animal
2. Derive a serum from its glands (but note: which glands in particular are never specified).
3. Inject said serum into yourself.
4. Gain the promised benefits.
5. Turn into a freakish half-man/half-animal

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8 Responses to “ Comic Book Diagnosis: The Glands Have It! ”

  1. Tordelback
    April 10th, 2008 at 2:23 am

    Hmm, my countryman W.B. Yeats was by many accounts a devotee of the fabled Monkey Gland in his later years, while attempting to regain the sexual vigour and poetic inspiration of his burning youth. I don’t think there was any noticeable monkeyism, at least not that was reported in the Senate records. As a matter of interest, do we know what glands were thought to be of use? (I dread to think).

  2. Keith
    April 10th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

    Read about the 1900’s craze in testes transplants here: http://www.altpenis.com/penis_news/testicle_transplants.shtml

    Which led to one of my favorite pieces of doggerel:

    “In 1922, Lepinasse performed the surgery on Harry F. McCormick, one of the richest men in the world at the time and the subject of much tabloid gossip. Such was his fame that the procedure made the front page of the New York Times. The donor was reputed to be that exemplar of maleness, a blacksmith, inspiring the ditty:

    Under the spreading chestnut tree,
    The village smithy stands,
    The smith a gloomy man is he,
    McCormick has his glands”

  3. Justin
    April 10th, 2008 at 10:09 pm

    Armour Thyroid seems to be having some trouble lately. The 2,3 & 4 grain strengths are on long term backorder. It seems like the manufacturer is phasing out the drug, but it could be a genuine supply issue. Who knows. All I can tell you for sure is that there are quite a few stressed out middle aged women at my pharmacy these days.
    –Justin

  4. Maire Smith
    April 11th, 2008 at 3:34 am

    This one was done by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, although the gland-injector found out by Sherlock Holmes just changed body language and personality to match the various species of apes and monkeys involved.

  5. Noah Brand
    April 11th, 2008 at 4:25 am

    You overlooked the Whizzer, who had possibly the best Golden Age origin of all. When he was mortally wounded in a plane crash, his scientist father saved his life by giving him a blood transfusion from a mongoose, which then gave him super-speed. Because, you know, ANYTHING works that way.

    It did have my all-time favorite comic-book-logic quote, though: “That’s it! I’ll inject the blood of a mongoose into Bob!”

    Seriously, what beats that?

  6. Keith
    April 11th, 2008 at 8:06 am

    Oh, man, I completely forgot the Whizzer! Kudos to you, Noah!

    //sucky for the poor mongoose, though.

  7. Will Entrekin
    April 11th, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    I know someone with hypothyroidism, who’s been on synthetic hormones; it f*****d up her metabolism in a bad way. She was telling me the other day that there are several forms, but that most doctors treat for type 4, and use synthetic hormones that can blow out the thyroid, whereas type 3, which is more common (?) is more effectively treated using Armour.

    Of course, caveat: hearsay.

  8. Hans Schumacher
    May 10th, 2008 at 1:21 pm

    Scott, I have a truly terrible example for you that easily trumps everything here.

    The Silver Age JLA villain Professor Amos Fortune discovered a pair of “luck glands” in human beings that affected…what else, a person’s good or bad fortunes in life. I believe he tried to defeat the Justice League of America by overstimulating their good luck glands so that they’d have nothing but bad luck. >_<

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