THE EXTERNAL SECRETORY FUNCTION OF THE HUMAN PANCREAS

Abstract
The earliest basic knowledge of the physiology of the external function of the pancreas came largely as a result of the pioneer studies of two eminent experimental physiologists, Claude Bernard1 and Ivan Pavlov.2 The former, in 1856, showed that pancreatic juice is highly essential to digestion; the latter, in 1902, demonstrated the existence of pancreatic enzymes. In the same year Bayliss and Starling3 investigated the factors concerned in the secretory stimulus of the pancreas and assigned the important role to a humoral mechanism which they named secretin. Many valuable contributions to the physiology of the pancreas have been made during the past thirty years, and McClure4 in a recent paper has enumerated as follows the important physiologic facts which are now firmly established: 1. Stimulation of the external secretion of the pancreas is of humoral origin, but the exact mechanism remains undetermined. 2. The ingestion of

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