The history
From seaweed for swollen necks to insulin made by bacteria: 2,500 years of learning how glands talk through the blood.
For thousands of years healers saw swollen necks and strange wasting illnesses, but nobody knew that small glands were to blame. In the 1800s experiments on roosters, dogs and patients showed that glands send something through the blood. In 1902 that something got a name: a hormone. Since then scientists have found dozens of hormones, learned that the brain is in charge of them, and learned to measure and even make them, saving millions of lives.
c. 6th century BCE
Oldest known description of goitre (attributed)
Sushruta Samhita, India
c. 4th century CE
Seaweed used to treat goitre
Ge Hong, China
1849
First experiment in endocrinology
Arnold Berthold, Germany
1891
Hormone therapy for a failing gland
George Murray, England
1900–1901
First hormone purified
Adrenaline: Jokichi Takamine and Keizo Uenaka, USA
16 Jan 1902
First hormone discovered
Secretin: Bayliss and Starling, London
1905
The word hormone
Ernest Starling, London
11 Jan 1922
First person treated with insulin
Leonard Thompson, Toronto
1965
First fully synthetic protein (insulin)
Chinese teams, Shanghai
1982
First medicine made by genetic engineering approved
Human insulin, USA
600 BCE – 1860
Healers notice swollen necks and strange illnesses. Seaweed helps goitre, anatomists find little glands with no pipes, and a London doctor links a gland to a deadly disease.
600 BCE
Traditionally c. 6th century BCE (attributed; the text grew over centuries)
The Sushruta Samhita, an old Sanskrit book of medicine and surgery, describes galaganda: a swelling at the front of the neck that hangs down. It sorts these swellings into different kinds and suggests treatments, from poultices to surgery.
Why it mattered. It is one of the oldest known descriptions of goitre, a swollen thyroid gland.
340
c. 4th century CE
The Chinese doctor and alchemist Ge Hong collected handy remedies in a book of emergency recipes. Among them was seaweed soaked in wine to shrink goitres. Nobody knew why it worked.
Why it mattered. Seaweed is full of iodine, the very thing the thyroid needs to make its hormones.
1563
1563 (his drawings from 1552 were printed only in 1714)
The Italian anatomist Bartolomeo Eustachi described small glands sitting on top of each kidney. Today we call them the adrenal glands. His beautiful copper-plate drawings sat unpublished for more than 150 years.
Why it mattered. The adrenals would later turn out to make adrenaline and cortisol, two of the body's most important hormones.
1656
In a book about the body's glands, the English doctor Thomas Wharton named the gland in the neck the thyroid. The name comes from the Greek word for a shield, because of the shape of the cartilage nearby. He guessed it was there to help round out the shape of the neck.
Why it mattered. Scientists could now point at the thyroid by name, even though its real job was still a mystery.
1855
Thomas Addison published a short book about patients who grew weak, thin and oddly bronze-skinned before they died. When the bodies were examined, their adrenal glands were damaged. The illness is now called Addison's disease.
Why it mattered. It was the first clear link between a damaged gland and a disease of the whole body.
1849 – 1901
Experiments show that glands are needed for life. A rooster, a dog without a pancreas and sheep thyroid extract prove that something in the blood does the work.
1849
Berthold removed the testes from young roosters, and they grew up without big red combs or crowing and fighting. When he put a testis back in a different place in the belly, the rooster grew up normal. No nerves had been reconnected, so something must travel in the blood.
Why it mattered. It is widely called the first experiment in endocrinology, showing that a gland can work through the blood.
1856
Soon after Addison's book, Brown-Séquard removed the adrenal glands from animals. They all died quickly. So these small glands were not spare parts: life depended on them.
Why it mattered. It proved by experiment what Addison had seen in his patients.
1869
As a 22-year-old medical student, Paul Langerhans looked at the pancreas under a microscope. He saw small clusters of cells scattered like islands among the cells that make digestive juice. He did not know what they did.
Why it mattered. These islets of Langerhans turned out to make insulin.
1889
Von Mering and Minkowski removed the pancreas from a dog to study digestion. The dog began to pass large amounts of urine full of sugar, just like a person with diabetes. The pancreas was doing something to control sugar.
Why it mattered. It pointed the hunt for a diabetes treatment at the pancreas.
1891
13 April 1891 (first injection)
A 46-year-old woman had myxoedema: her thyroid was failing, and she was slow, cold and puffy. George Murray injected her with an extract of sheep thyroid, and within months she was much better. She kept taking it and lived to 74.
Why it mattered. It was one of the first times a missing hormone was replaced, an idea still used by millions today.
1894
The story goes that George Oliver, a country doctor, gave adrenal extract to his son and noticed a change in his pulse. He took it to Edward Schäfer in London. When they injected it into a dog, the blood pressure shot up.
Why it mattered. It showed that the adrenal glands release a powerful substance into the blood.
1901
1900–1901
The Japanese chemist Jokichi Takamine and his assistant Keizo Uenaka purified the active substance from adrenal glands and crystallised it. Takamine called it Adrenalin. It was soon used to stop bleeding and to treat asthma attacks.
Why it mattered. It was the first hormone ever to be purified.
1902 – 1936
Secretin is found, the word hormone is born, thyroxine is crystallised and insulin saves children with diabetes.
1902
16 January 1902
Bayliss and Starling put a little acid into a dog's small intestine after cutting its nerves. The pancreas still poured out juice. When they injected an extract of the intestine lining into the blood, the pancreas responded too: a chemical, which they named secretin, carried the message.
Why it mattered. It proved that the body sends chemical messages through the blood, not only through nerves.
1905
20 June 1905
In his Croonian Lectures, Starling needed a name for these chemical messengers. He used hormone, from a Greek word meaning to arouse or set in motion. The idea came from a dinner-table chat with colleagues in Cambridge.
Why it mattered. A single word gave a whole new science something to talk about.
1914
25 December 1914
Edward Kendall had spent months boiling down pig thyroid glands. On Christmas Day he finally saw crystals of the pure hormone, later called thyroxine. It was packed with iodine.
Why it mattered. It explained why iodine and seaweed help the thyroid, and led to thyroid tablets.
1922
1921–22 (first patient 11 January 1922)
In 1921 Banting and Best made an extract from the pancreas that lowered sugar in dogs. In January 1922, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, close to death from diabetes, got the first injections; after Collip purified the extract, he recovered. Banting and Macleod won the Nobel Prize in 1923 and shared the money with Best and Collip.
Why it mattered. Type 1 diabetes changed from a death sentence into a disease people could live with.
1936 – 1977
Stress, cortisone and melatonin join the story, and the brain turns out to steer the pituitary with its own tiny hormones.
1936
4 July 1936
Hans Selye noticed that rats hurt in very different ways, by cold, injury or drugs, all showed the same changes, including swollen adrenal glands. He described this in a short letter to Nature. He later called it stress.
Why it mattered. It showed that hormones help the whole body respond to any kind of danger.
1948
21 September 1948 (Nobel Prize 1950)
A young woman with painful rheumatoid arthritis could hardly get out of bed. Doctors injected her with compound E, an adrenal hormone Kendall had purified, now called cortisone. Within about a week she said she had never felt better in her life. Hench, Kendall and Reichstein won the Nobel Prize in 1950.
Why it mattered. It showed how strong adrenal hormones are, and steroid medicines have been used ever since.
1955
Late 1940s to 1955
The pituitary was called the master gland, but what controlled it? Geoffrey Harris showed that tiny blood vessels carry chemicals from the hypothalamus in the brain straight down to the pituitary. With Dora Jacobsohn he showed that cutting this blood link stopped the pituitary working. He summed it up in his 1955 book Neural Control of the Pituitary Gland.
Why it mattered. It joined the nervous system and the hormone system into one control network.
1958
Aaron Lerner was studying skin colour. An old report said cow pineal glands made tadpole skin go pale, so he processed thousands of pineal glands. He isolated a new hormone and called it melatonin.
Why it mattered. Melatonin turned out to be the hormone that tells the body it is night.
1971
TRH 1969, GnRH 1971 (Nobel Prize 1977)
Harris had predicted the hypothalamus sends chemical signals to the pituitary. Two rival teams ground up millions of sheep and pig brains to find them. In 1969 they found TRH, which tells the pituitary to wake up the thyroid, and in 1971 Schally's team found GnRH, which controls puberty and fertility.
Why it mattered. The brain's releasing hormones sit at the very top of the hormone chain, and both men shared the 1977 Nobel Prize.
1956 – 2023
A Himalayan valley trial leads to iodised salt for a whole country, while diabetes grows into one of India's biggest health challenges.
1956
1956–1972
In the Himalayan foothills, goitre was very common. Researchers split the valley into zones: some families got salt with added iodine, others got plain salt. In the iodised zones, goitre became much less common.
Why it mattered. It proved that iodised salt could prevent goitre across a whole population.
1962
Building on the Kangra results, India launched the National Goitre Control Programme. It surveyed areas where goitre was common and supplied iodised salt to them. The whole cost was paid by the central government.
Why it mattered. It was one of India's first national programmes to prevent a hormone problem with food.
1992
August 1992
India renamed its goitre programme the National Iodine Deficiency Disorders Control Programme. The new name showed that lack of iodine harms far more than the neck: it can slow a child's growth and learning. The goal became iodised salt for everyone, called universal salt iodisation.
Why it mattered. It turned a programme for a few hill areas into a plan for every kitchen in India.
2006
Notified 17 November 2005, in force 17 May 2006
An earlier ban on selling non-iodised salt for eating had been lifted in 2000. In 2005 the government brought it back under food law, and it took effect in May 2006. Salt for people to eat had to have iodine added.
Why it mattered. A national rule made sure iodine reached families without them having to choose it.
2023
June 2023
A huge survey tested more than 113,000 people across India. It found that about 11.4% of adults had diabetes, around 101 million people, and about 136 million more had prediabetes. The results were published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.
Why it mattered. It showed that keeping blood sugar in balance is now one of India's biggest health challenges.
By the numbers
National Family Health Survey rounds. The first two counted salt with at least 15 parts per million of iodine; the later two counted any iodised salt, so the jump is partly a change in measure as well as real progress.
1959 – 2023
Scientists learn to measure hormones in tiny amounts, build insulin from scratch, make it with bacteria and find a hormone made by fat.
1960
1959–1960
Hormones float in the blood in astonishingly tiny amounts. Yalow and Berson used antibodies and a little radioactivity to measure insulin in human blood for the first time. They called the method radioimmunoassay and did not patent it.
Why it mattered. Doctors and scientists could finally measure hormones, and Yalow won the 1977 Nobel Prize.
1965
17 September 1965
Teams of Chinese chemists joined amino acids one by one to build both chains of insulin, then joined the chains together. The result formed crystals and worked just like natural insulin. It was the first protein ever made fully in a lab.
Why it mattered. It showed that a hormone is just a molecule that chemists can build.
1978
1978 (approved for patients October 1982)
For 60 years insulin came from pig and cow pancreases. In 1978 scientists put the human insulin gene into bacteria, which then made human insulin. In 1982 it became the first medicine made this way to be approved.
Why it mattered. It gave the world a steady supply of human insulin and launched the biotech industry.
1994
December 1994
Scientists found the gene that was broken in a strain of very fat mice. It made a hormone, called leptin, that fat cells release into the blood. Leptin tells the brain how much energy the body has stored.
Why it mattered. It showed that body fat is not just storage but a hormone-making gland.
Did you know?
The word hormone comes from a Greek word meaning to arouse or set in motion.
Adrenaline was purified in 1901, a year before secretin, but secretin is called the first hormone because Bayliss and Starling were the first to show a chemical messenger at work.
Leonard Thompson, the first person treated with insulin, was 14 and lived for another 13 years.
Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson chose not to patent radioimmunoassay, so labs everywhere could use it.
Your pituitary gland, which helps run so many other glands, is only about the size of a pea.
The people
1793 – 1860 · Physician · England
Described the adrenal disease that bears his name in a 39-page book in 1855.
1854 – 1922 · Chemist · Japan, worked in the USA
With Keizo Uenaka, purified adrenaline, the first hormone ever isolated.
1860 – 1924 · Physiologist · England
Co-discovered secretin with his brother-in-law Ernest Starling.
1866 – 1927 · Physiologist · England
Co-discovered secretin and gave the world the word hormone.
1886 – 1972 · Chemist · USA
Crystallised thyroxine on Christmas Day 1914 and later purified cortisone, winning a Nobel Prize.
1891 – 1941 · Surgeon and researcher · Canada
Led the Toronto work that turned a pancreas extract into life-saving insulin.
1908 – 1983 · Physiologist and endocrinologist · Germany, worked in Sweden
With Geoffrey Harris, showed that the pituitary needs its blood link to the brain.
1913 – 1971 · Physiologist · England
Often called the father of neuroendocrinology for showing how the brain controls the pituitary.
1921 – 2011 · Medical physicist · USA
Invented radioimmunoassay with Solomon Berson and won the 1977 Nobel Prize.
1921 – 2001 · Pathologist and medical scientist · India
Led the Kangra Valley study that proved iodised salt prevents goitre.
1924 – 2024 · Physiologist · France, worked in the USA
Raced to find the brain's releasing hormones and shared the 1977 Nobel Prize.
1926 – 2024 · Endocrinologist · Poland, worked in the USA
Found TRH and GnRH, and shared the 1977 Nobel Prize with his rival Guillemin.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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