History of the Neurovascular Concept of Hypothalamo-Hypophysial Control

It is indeed a great honor to be selected by the Society to receive the Hartman Award and I am most grateful. 1 was an ardent admirer of Carl Hartman from the time I first met him in the early ‘40’s at Stanford University. He was a personal friend of Joe Markee with whom I worked and whom 1 accompanied to Duke University and I had the benefit of numerous discussions while Hartman was visiting Markee’s laboratories in California and North Carolina. Hartman chaired a session in the Zoology meetings in Washington in the summer of 1948 in which I was presenting a short paper and I remember thinking how remarkable it was that this 70-year-old gentleman kept up so well with the literature and could stimulate such a lively discussion. Well, ten years later, in 1958, Chuck Lloyd organized a symposium in Syracuse, New York, and Carl Hartman was there, now close to 80, dynamically chairing the session in which Geoffrey Harris and I were the speakers. By that time, I was prepared for another repeat in 1968, but although Carl was active in the ‘60’s and published a book at the age of 84, he departed shortly before his 89th birthday in March, 1968. Many of the discussions with Hartman in Markee’s laboratories in the 1940’s concerned nervous control of pituitary-gonad function and the role of the pituitary portal system in transmitting information from the brain to the adenohypophysis. Those were exciting days and I thought it might be of interest to you to recall some of the events in the historical development of the neurovascular concept of hypothalamo-hypophysial control.