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Remembrance of H. W. Magoun's Contributions to the Development of Neuroendocrinology

Abstract

The recent death in March 1991, of one of this century's foremost neuroscientists, Dr. H. W. Magoun (Fig. 1), recalls that his seminal research on the structure and function of the hypothalamus in the 1930s laid a cornerstone for the development of neuroendocrinology. In Ranson's Institute of Neurology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago Magoun and his colleagues demonstrated that specific areas of the hypothalamus exert controls not only over feeding, drinking, body temperature, and sleep but also over certain pituitary functions and animal behavior related to reproduction and water metabolism.

Magoun was personally involved in all of these studies, employing Ranson's newly commissioned reconstruction of a Horsley-Clarke stereotaxic instrument for making localized lesions and stimulating specific nuclei in the cat or monkey hypothalamus. He worked closely with Ingram and Fisher on cats in which supraoptic nucleus lesions led to diabetes insipidus presumably by denervating pituicytes, then considered the source of antidiuretic hormone. He also found that cutting the pituitary stalk at the median eminence level in monkeys induced polyuria and polydipsia while destroying the large nerve cells in the supraoptic nucleus by retrograde degeneration. He published these latter results in Endocrinology and The Anatomical Record in 1939.

Received April 29, 1991.