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Sir Henry Dale was perhaps the last of the polymaths of medical research. Although he did not claim to be an endocrinologist he nevertheless made important contributions to the neo-natal development of modern endocrinology, and later he helped to provide most valuable nourishment during the hungry adolescence of this restless subject. Conventional labels completely fail to match the achievements of Sir Henry Dale.

In 1906 he published a classical dissertation 'On some physiological actions of ergot' (Dale, 1906) in which much was made clear about the complexity of action on blood pressure and on the contraction of plain muscle of an extract of this fungus. In investigating the reversal by ergot extract of certain actions of adrenaline the young Dale used, for a control experiment, pressor material from the posterior lobe of the pituitary gland. He thus quite unexpectedly observed that not only was the action of the posterior pituitary