The discovery of a third circulatory system, what scientists now call the interstitium, could transform our understanding of how the human body works. The existence of an apparent conduit between skin and the fascia beneath it — two tissue layers not known to connect with each other in this way — challenged accepted anatomic boundaries. That interstitial spaces exist in and under the skin, and between and around the body’s organs, had been observed more than a century ago, but they were assumed to exist in isolation from one another, like a patchwork quilt. Recent findings implied that the body’s interstitial spaces were parts of a vast interconnected whole — less like a quilt and more like a knitted blanket. The interstitium may also change how we view our own bodies in relation to other biological systems, including some of the most ancient life-forms on our planet — and provide a link between Eastern and Western medicine. FEATURES THIS WEEK’S COVER
FROM THE ARCHIVES The Father of Testosterone?Azeen Ghorayshi’s feature story on testosterone mentions the physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, an early pioneer in endocrinology who kicked off the efforts to discover the hormone — by injecting himself with substances he made from crushed dog or guinea pig testicles in hopes of restoring his own vigor. That led thousands of doctors to inject patients with “similar testicular elixirs, trying to cure a wide range of male afflictions.” In 2013, Elizabeth Weil wrote about reading Brown-Séguard’s own account, written in 1889: Another, far stranger, book that I’m reading is “The ‘Elixir of Life’: Dr. Brown-Séguard’s Own Account of His Famous Alleged Remedy for Debility and Old Age.” It’s Brown-Séguard’s story, published in 1889, of injecting himself at age 72 with a slurry of filtered and diluted dog and guinea pig testicles. His is the first documented testosterone doping. He loved it: “The day after the first subcutaneous injections and still more after the two succeeding ones a radical change took place in me … I regained at least all the strength I possessed a good many years ago.” As noted in Ghorayshi’s article, Brown-Séquard’s “change” came largely from a placebo effect; testosterone wasn’t isolated and reproduced until the 1930s. COLUMNS
COMMENT OF THE WEEK The Loneliest Man in the WorldFrom Sonia on this week’s On Language column on “smart” and “dumb” tech: I’m a pretty tech-savvy 72-year-old woman, and I like to know how things work (and to fix them myself, if I can). One increasingly negative feature of “smart” devices is that they can be so unforgivably unintuitive to use, especially at start up. It is also exponentially more expensive to fix a “smart” device (“just get a new one”) than if it were more mechanical. My rather young washer-dryer repairman, who came to the house only every two years to replace the belts (“the loneliest man in the world”), would always leave advising me “never give up your 35-year-old machines” in favor of appliances that would play a song instead of that familiar “buzz” when the load was done. Honestly, I am not anti-technology, but I’ll never give up all analog clocks and watches. It is so sort of calming to turn out the lights one by one, and not feel like I’m going to sleep in the middle of an airport landing field. That’s all for this week. Email us at magazine@nytimes.com with your thoughts, questions and feedback. Stay in touch: Like this email? Forward it to a friend and help us grow. Loved a story? Hated it? Write us a letter at magazine@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward this to you? Sign up here to get the magazine newsletter.
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