The Glands Regulating Personality / A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature

by Louis Berman

THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS IN HISTORY

According to the views, facts and guesses concerning human personality, as a body-mind complex dominated by the internal secretions, outlined in the preceding pages, biography, and human history as the interaction of biographies, become capable of interpretation from a new standpoint. If human life, in its essentials, is so much the product of the internal messenger system we speak of as the endocrines, then biography should present us with a number of illustrations of their power and influence. What is the evidence that, as Huxley anticipated, "the introduction into the economy of a molecular mechanism which, like a cunningly contrived torpedo, shall find its way to some particular group of living elements, and cause an explosion among them, leaving the rest untouched," and the multiplication of such cunningly contrived mechanisms, were responsible for those personalities, magnificent chemical compounds, with whose adventures historians are concerned?

THE CASE OF NAPOLEON

As a unique will and intelligence, Napoleon Bonaparte the First must be classed as one of the Betelegeuses of the race. H.G. Wells has called his career the "raid of an intolerable egotist across the disordered beginning of a new time." "The figure of an adventurer and wrecker." "This saturnine egotist." "Are men dazzled simply by the scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?" "This dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar." There are other opinions. The Man of Destiny was worshipped by millions. Napoleona bring fortunes today. Interest in the man as a man has multiplied with every year. And certainly no one can deny him the quality of individuality in its most exaggerated form.

In the second place he belongs among the moderns. Modern science and methods of observation have had their chance at him, and have left a conscious record of their results. Napoleon was the central figure of his time, and was watched by trained medical eyes during his life, and after his death. Protocols of the examination of his body are accessible, and Napoleonic specimens, preserved by fixing agents, may still be viewed at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, England. Dr. Leonard Guthrie has worked up the material at hand in a report which he presented to the historical section of the International Congress of Medicine, in London in 1913. I propose to relate his findings to some other facts and the general principles roughly sketched in this book.

There are a number of word portraits of Napoleon extant. But for our purposes certain of the notable features of his face and physique are to be considered. The first characteristic that struck everyone about him was the matter of his height. He was definitely sub-average, at death being about five feet six inches in height. As has been emphasized several times, deficiency or excess of growth will always direct attention to the pituitary. His sharply outlined features and a powerful lower jaw, combined with oddly small plump hands, long straight black hair, and dark complexion, all point to the pituitary, with a secondary adrenal effect. His pulse was slow, according to Corvisart, his personal physician, rarely above 50 to the minute. His sexual life, his libido, was abnormal. Curiously explosive in their appearance and manifestations were his sexual impulses. They "beset him on occasions which were sometimes inconvenient, and a peculiarity about them was that they subsided with equal suddenness if not immediately gratified, or if meanwhile something occurred to discourage his attention. All women were to him 'filles de joie.' Sexual rather than social attractions in women appealed to him." He was never in love, never possessed of permanent affection or tenderness for any woman. This explosive periodicity of the sexual life, "with a tendency to compression of it to the merely physical," is another mark of some pituitary-centered personalities.

Two other phenomena that persisted throughout his life throw light upon his endocrine constitution. One was trouble with his bladder which he told Antommarchi, another physician, bothered him as long as he could remember. Irritability of the bladder was so pronounced that he could not sleep for more than a few hours at a time. After battles, the trouble became worse so that it interfered with his riding. Constitutional difficulties in urination have been connected definitely with the function of the pituitary. The other pituitary disturbances which tinctured his life were certain "brain storms," attacks of vomiting followed by "stupor verging on unconsciousness" brought on by outbursts of temper, physical overexertion, mental strain, or sexual excitement. It has been shown that such epileptic tendencies are present in subjects of pituitary disease, particularly those with pituitary instability. In Napoleon's case the brain attacks may have been crises of pituitary insufficiency in a hyper-pituitary type. This supposition is borne out by the headache which followed them, the headache of an oversecreting pituitary compensating for a defect in its formation. During his prime, his intellect was mathematical, logical, and rational, and remarkable for a prodigious memory. Such an intellect is the product of an extraordinary ante-pituitary. That he never permitted feeling to interfere with the dictates of his judgment, a quality which rendered him the most unscrupulous careerist of history, must be put down to an insufficiency of the post-pituitary. What post-pituitary does to the brain cells and the organism as a whole to render them susceptible to sympathy and suggestion, the social sublimations of the maternal instinct, with its offsprings of religion and art, we have seen. Napoleon lacked a chemical trace of the religious instinct, his sympathy was nil, and his conquests were made possible only because he was blind to the suffering and misery his greed for glory and dominion generated. Post-pituitary insufficients of this type, patent or concealed, gradually become corpulent as they grow older. The increasing corpulency of Napoleon was commented upon by all observers.

A student of his make-up, and acquainted with present developments concerning the internal secretions, given an opportunity to observe him as we have when he was alive, and at the height of his success, would have had every reason for classing him a pituitary-centered, ante-pituitary superior, post-pituitary inferior, with an instability of both that would lead to his final degeneration. Besides, his insatiable energy indicated an excellent thyroid, his pugnacity, animality and genius for practical affairs a superb adrenal. Given the kind of pituitary he possessed, with its great intellectual potential energy and the relation between the two parts which would further the objects of an intellectual machine, plus a remarkable thyroid and adrenal, plus the military education Napoleon had, and the character of the Revolution into which he was plunged, and we have the conditions out of which his career emerged as inevitable.

That it was his pituitary which first failed him, rather than the thyroid or adrenal, which might have, is demonstrated by a number of considerations. Before he made himself Emperor, it was noticed that he was becoming fat, a pituitary symptom. A comparison of portraits at different stages of his rise and fall shows an increasing abdominal paunch, and a laying down of fat in the pituitary areas, around the hips, the legs and so on. The beginning of weakness in judgment that he was to exhibit soon in the invasion of Russia manifested itself at the same time. His keen calculating ability attained the peak of its curve at Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland. Thereafter, the descent begins. A rash, grandiose, speculative quality enters his projects, and divorces the elaborate coordination of means and end from his plans. That his thyroid energy capacity did not fail him is indicated by the fact that at St. Albans he would ride for three hours at the end of the day to tire himself sufficiently for sleep. That his adrenals were not affected is indicated by the brutality which remained characteristic to the end of his life.

The findings after death confirm the view of him as an unstable pituitocentric who succumbed to pituitary insufficiency toward the latter half of his life. We possess the account of the postmortem by Dr. Henry, who performed it. "The whole surface of the body was deeply covered with fat. Over the sternum, where generally the bone is very superficial, the fat was upwards of an inch deep, and an inch and a half or two inches on the abdomen. There was scarcely any hair on the body, and that of the head was thin, fine and silky. The whole genital system (very small) seemed to exhibit a physical cause for the absence of sexual desire, and the chastity which had been stated to have characterized the deceased (during his stay at St. Helena). The skin was noticed to be very white and delicate as were the hands and arms. Indeed the whole body was slender and effeminate. The pubis much resembled the Mons Veneris in women. The muscles of the chest were small, the shoulders were narrow and the hips wide." In other words, the typical feminization of the body which accompanies pituitary insufficiency was found. He died of a cancer of the stomach. But before his death there were noted the mental transformations that succeed deficiency of his central endocrine. Apathy, indolence, fatigability, and frilosity were what impressed his associates at St. Helena. The deterioration of his mentality was also exemplified in his literary diversions, the "Siege of Troy" and the "Essay on Suicide." The puerility of these productions, as well as of his conduct, a sulking before his captors, and the decline of his physical energy, once a bottomless well, all point to the same conclusion.

The rise and fall of Napoleon followed the rise and fall of his pituitary gland. No better illustration exists of the fundamental determination of a personality and its career by an endocrine, aside from other factors of education, environment, accident and opportunity. Without the sort of endocrine equipment he was born with, however, none of the other factors would have found the material to work upon. Born, say, with more of a posterior pituitary than he had, which would have rendered him more sensitive to the sufferings of his fellow-creatures, if nothing else, and the forces of the Revolution probably would have swamped him from the very first moment of his emergence at Toulon, when the whiff of grape-shot, symptom of an inexorable, merciless intellect and will, started him upon the road that led to the Napoleonic Era. Destiny is always ironic. For the deficiency of the internal secretions which made him eligible for glory was responsible as well as for his downfall.

EPILEPSY AND MIGRAINE IN GENIUS

In the annals of genius, there occur a number of instances of those who suffered from attacks that have been diagnosed epilepsy or migraine. Because their ailment was associated with their extraordinary ability, they attracted an attention that concerned itself not at all with the circumstance that genius has also been liable to measles, scarlet fever, and so on. Epilepsy and migraine certainly occur in people of no supernormal gifts, and often in degenerates and subnormals. Yet the fact remains that these affections of the nervous system, so terrible to feel and to behold, have afflicted the finest brains of the race.

About forty years ago the idea established itself that epilepsy, exhibiting itself in one form or another as "fits," and migraine, the severe periodic sick headache, were interconvertible manifestations of the same underlying morbid process in the brain. Nothing in the way of a concrete cause, attackable on the material side, was elicited by this generalization. Then the investigations of the pituitary in the last decade produced evidence of epilepsy-like and migraine-like symptoms in sufferers from tumors or other enlargements of it. Reasoning back, cases of epilepsy and migraine began to be examined for evidences of involvement of the pituitary in their troubles. These accumulated rapidly. The physiognomy and physique of the pituito-centric were discovered in them. The phenomena noted in Napoleon's case were often present: lowering of the pulse, chilliness, and an increased irritability of the bladder. In women the attack often coincides with the menstrual period, a typical time of endocrine unbalance. Finally X-ray examinations of the sella turcica, the bony lodging of the pituitary, clinched the matter: it often appeared small, or enlarged, with erosions of the bone, signifying a desperate attempt of the gland to grow, and meet the needs of the organism. The complex of appearances called migraine now becomes understandable. There are a number of factors, such as fatigue, intense cold, or high sugar food like chocolate, which will cause an engorgement of the gland with blood and swelling of it. But they do not concern us now. Intense mental occupation, concentration as the popular term has it, acts as a patent excitor of the attack.

Brain work drives more blood into the brain and the gland. Besides, mental activity is accompanied by increased function of the ante-pituitary, if intellectual, or of the post-pituitary if emotional. Brain work then causes a temporary enlargement of the gland. If, now, the bone container of the endocrine is too small to permit of much swelling, the bone will be pressed against or even worn into. This means headache, severe, easily going on to the kind known as sick-headache. The nerves which move the eyes in various directions lie next to the pituitary. If, in its expansion, it moves sufficiently outward, it may press upon, irritate them or paralyze, and so evolve various eye disturbances in association with the headache. No one can overrate this conception of migraine, for a number of men of genius have suffered from sick-headache and eye symptoms.

As for epilepsy, the problem is more complex. One has to rule out first those who have organic destructive disease of the brain. But they are out of our field: genius predicates at least an intact brain. Of the others a number may be interpreted upon an endocrine basis. At least they will, in their physiognomy, physique, mentality, conduct and character, document the glandular constellation under which they live, and a proper understanding of which is necessary for them to be helped. One frequently seen is the thymo-centric, with small enclosed sella turcica. The latter fact explains the occurrence of the epilepsy. Periodic variations in the secretory tides of the other endocrines, the ovaries, the thyroid, and so on, may determine the onset of the attack of "fits." The point is that when epilepsy plays a constant part in the life history of a man of genius, we are justified in assuming a disturbed balance among his hormones, and so a reasoned picture perhaps of the foundations for the erratic in his behaviour or his productions.

THE NEURASTHENIC GENIUS

The fin de siècle intelligentsia of the nineteenth century were quite stirred up by a publication of Max Nordau on "Degeneration," in which a number of revered artists and intelligents were held up to public scorn as degenerates and neurasthenics. So wrought up were they, in fact, that Bernard Shaw was moved to compose a defense entitled "The Sanity of Art." In spite of the Great Vegetarian's dialectics, it remains to be explained why a certain species of creative ability has been combined with the fatigability, variability and general wretched irritability of every organ and tissue in the body which taught them that they were sensitive souls imprisoned in the flesh. Going from doctor to doctor as from pillar to post, from this medical creed to that hygienic cult, lucky to escape the worst, often landing upon the bosom of New Thought for succor. We have noted in previous chapters the relation of neurasthenia to the glands of internal secretion in general, and to adrenal insufficiency in particular. A closer examination of neurasthenic genius will show it to consist essentially of a pituitocentric in whom for one reason or another, congenital (the persistence of the thymus) or acquired (shocks, accidents, diseases) there has been failure of the adrenals, thyroid or the interstitial cells, about in the order of their occurrence.

THE CASE OF NIETZSCHE

Friedrich Nietzsche is about as good a case as there is on record of a genius blasted by migraine. The originality and force of his mind, as well as the articulate music of an imaginative poet, places Nietzsche among the philosophic elect of the race. Showing that he was an unstable pituitary-centered of a certain type will throw light upon his malady, as well as upon his life and work.

In a set of volumes, entitled Biographic Clinics, Dr. George M. Gould of Philadelphia contended that the ill health of a number of men and women of genius of the nineteenth century was due to unconnected eye troubles. In attempting to bolster up his thesis he has collected biographic material useful to the student of personality. He never appears to have asked himself what was behind the eye trouble. The evidence relating to Nietzsche's endocrine personality is derived from some of the data he collected, as well as from the two volume life of the philosopher written by his sister, and the other biographies of him extant.

To reconstruct the endocrine formula or equation of Nietzsche inductively, one should analyze first the information available concerning his parents and relatives. His grandfather was a conservative bourgeois of a superior type, who was the author of treatises designed to narcotize the forces of rebellion of his time. What he was like physically, no epitaph declares. His father was a clergyman. A description of him reads … "tall and slender, with a noble and poetic personality, and a peculiar talent for music … short-sighted." That ranks him at once as a pituito-centric. The mother was dark and had a fiery temper and came of a family distinguished for the powerfully built anatomy of its members. In the heredity of Nietzsche, the father appears therefore to supply a pituitary predominating element, the mother an adrenal-pituitary predominating element.

Nietzsche himself worked strenuously at the intellectual life (after 20, when he probably stopped growing, and the brain tonic action of the ante-pituitary could manifest itself). Early distinction rewarded him with a professorship in philology at 24. One of Prussia's wars of conquest entangled him, and presented him with diphtheria. A friendship with Richard Wagner marked the turning point of his life, and the point of departure for his works on the most fundamental values of human life. Meanwhile, attacks of sick-headache of varying degrees of severity made him miserable periodically—they came about every two weeks and lasted two to three days—and left him wretched and exhausted. At last, at 44, a species of stroke terminated his sufferings, causing him to lose his speech and memory, and thenceforth there was progressive deterioration, physical and spiritual, with repeated attacks.

In the sister's biography there are several good photographs and reproductions of sculptures of Nietzsche at different ages. An examination of the frontispiece picture, which shows him in profile (profile views are the best for physiognomy), as well as of the bust of Nietzsche by Donndorf, exhibit the most striking traits of the head. To the student of internal secretions, the most prominent feature of the face, emphasized by both the camera and the artist, is the remarkable prominence of the supra-orbital arches, the bony protuberances from which the eyebrows spring. This is a definite pituitary character. The eyebrows themselves are luxurious and slope to meet, the bony development of the face as a whole is sharp and clean-cut, the skull tends to be long and narrow and the chin is square. All these point to a pituitary-centered personality. It is to be regretted that we have no picture or record of Nietzsche caught smiling, which would have preserved the state of his teeth for us. At any rate, considered as checks to my interpretation, his physiognomy and physique, the nature of his genius and the attacks which finally ruined his life, all fit into the conception of him as one whose life centered, like Napoleon's, around what was happening in his sella turcica.

The attacks of sick-headache, diagnosable symptomatically as migraine, were so devastating that in 1883, after the printing of his masterpiece, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," he wrote "My life has been a complete failure." Extracts from his letters, collected by Gould, provide some idea of his suffering. In 1888, just before his stroke, he said, "I have in my eyes a dynamometer of my entire condition."

The history of Nietzsche's eye trouble makes it probable that not simply a defect in his eyes themselves, but a deeper condition behind them was responsible. Up to the age of 15 he was a model scholar. Essential eye defects of refraction should make themselves felt during childhood. Then, with adolescence, he changed. Adolescence is one of the red-letter epochs for the pituitary, when its growth and enlargement precedes and stimulates the ripening of the sex cells in the reproductive organs. Until adolescence ended and physical development ceased, his intellectual interests were nil, and he was particularly backward in mathematics. Colds and coughs, and recurring pains in the head and eyes bothered him (colds and coughs are frequent in those whose pituitary expansion is limited by the bony sella turcica to any extent). After his puberty, migraine definitely became his demon companion. Following the diphtheria in the army (which must have damaged his adrenals), the attacks grew much worse, and complaints about them more bitter because the pituitary now, in addition to its own burden, had to compensate for the insufficient adrenals. So "his frequent illness made him more and more a subject of treatment and commiseration…. If only my eyes would hold out … it seems to me at the age of 30 as if I had lived 60 years … very frequent sufferings of stomach, head and eyes … acidity oppresses me, and everything except the tenderest food becomes acid…. I cannot doubt that I am the victim of a serious cerebral disease, and that stomach and eyes suffer only from this central cause … half-dead with pain and exhaustion." In December 1888, he fell, had to be helped home, lay silent for two days, then became loud, active and unbalanced. The attack was preceded by the drinking of much water.

The specific quality of the Nietzsche genius also directs attention to a pituitocentric, to a pituitocentric in whom both ante-pituitary and post-pituitary are extraordinarily well-functioning, but are in a state of unbalance in which the post-pituitary gets the upper hand. Now, as we have seen, the post-pituitary makes for that instability of association between the brain cells which must be at the bottom of originality and creative thought, as well as of phobias, obsessions, hysterias and hallucinations. Persons in whom the post-pituitary predominates have a lively fancy and are liable to suffer from the tricks of association. Nietzsche, as we have noted, was poor in mathematics and in the calm cool proportioned forward march of scientific thought in general. His most brilliant ideas came to him in flashes and gleams. That is why so much of his work has come down to us in the form of aphorisms and paragraphs. He was, essentially, a poet among the metaphysicians, which again favors the conception of him as a pituitary-centered with a dominant post-pituitary. Yet his incisive critical faculty, as well as his love of music, also document the supernormal ante-pituitary.

To sum up, the physique and physiognomy of Nietzsche, his migraine attacks and the later fate which overtook him, his likes and dislikes, his tastes, abilities and accomplishments followed from his composition as one pituitary-centered, with post-pituitary domination, a superior thyroid, and inferior adrenals.

DARWIN AS A NEURASTHENIC GENIUS

Charles Darwin, as the author of the "Origin of Species" and the greatest revolutionist of the nineteenth century, has naturally had a great deal of attention paid to his life and personality. Yet not until the publication of his Autobiography and his son's Reminiscences was it generally known that he suffered from chronic ill health for most of his adult life. Dr. W.A. Johnston, in an article in the American Anthropologist, 1901, has marshalled a number of available facts, to sustain his thesis that Darwin was a victim of neurasthenia. Now neurasthenia, it is now accepted, is simply a waste-basket word, corresponding to the class miscellaneous in a classification of any group of real objects. And, as has been emphasized in preceding chapters, most neurasthenia rises upon a disturbed endocrine foundation, most often, an insufficiency of the adrenals. That is, a defect in the chain of co-operation, balance and compensation among the internal secretions is the basis for the weakness of the nervous system the term neurasthenia is supposed to explain, actually only names. Darwin's case was pretty certainly that.

There can be no doubt that Darwin had an abnormal fatigability, a lack of stamina and endurance in mental as well as physical application which plagued him from the late twenties to the sixties. As a child, he was strong and healthy, fond of outdoors, and though underrated by his teachers, noted to be possessed of intense curiosity, especially concerning natural objects. At school he was a fleet runner and cultivated a habit of long walks. Then he was surely no neurasthenic. Three years which, he himself afterwards said, were worse than wasted, at Cambridge, were filled with shooting, riding and hunting. His good health lasted until the time he probably stopped growing at 21 or 22. Thereafter his troubles began.

What was Darwin, so far as his endocrine composition was concerned? In the first place his father was a variety of pituitocentric, of the post-pituitary inferior type, six feet two inches tall, exceedingly corpulent, and, in the eyes of his son, the sharpest of observers and the most sympathetic of men. He wished to make a physician out of his son in order to carry on the medical tradition of the family: Erasmus Darwin was a physician before him. His son, however, showed no inclination for so learned and confining a profession and had to be reproached by his father in these immortal words: "You care for nothing but shooting dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."

Cambridge came after Edinburgh, as he was rushed from medicine into the clergy. But in vain. A friendship struck up with a naturalist, Henslow, settled his career for him. Henslow heard of a trip of general exploration the ship Beagle was to take and recommended Darwin as naturalist. The captain at first would not hear of the proposal because of Darwin's nose, a typical pituitary proboscis. But his prejudices were overcome, and Darwin sailed.

It was upon this voyage that Darwin made himself the greatest naturalist of all time, and at the same time infected himself with the virus of neurasthenia. At Plymouth, while waiting for the ship to sail, he complained of palpitation and pain about the heart, probably due to a transient hyperthyroidism, brought on by excitement. During the voyage, which lasted five years, he was afflicted often by sea-sickness. A ship-mate relates that after spending an hour with the microscope he would say "Old Fellow, I must take the horizontal for it" and lie down. He would stretch out on one side of the table, then resume his labors for a while when he again had to lie down. Already fatigability had to be fed with rest. A serious illness that Darwin claimed affected every secretion of his body acted probably as the exhausting drain upon his adrenal potential.

The return to England was the date of onset for a record of continuous illness, aggravated by his marriage, apparently, for his misery increased progressively after it. So much so that he was forced to leave London altogether so as to avoid the strain of social life, even that of meeting his scientific friends or attending scientific society meetings fatiguing him to exhaustion. After such occasions there would be attacks of violent shivering, with vomiting and giddiness. It was necessary for him to impose upon himself an absolute régime of daily routine. Any interference with it upset him completely, and made it impossible for him to do any work. Early morning was the only time for physical as we; as mental exertion. Evening found him thoroughly used up, with every move an effort. Insomnia made him its prey. A curious sensitiveness to heat and cold distressed him. In 1859, when the "Origin of Species" appeared, he wrote to a friend that his health had quite failed, and that indigestion, headaches, with a looming hopeless breakdown of body and mind made his life a burden and a curse. The twenty years of research he devoted to the problems of evolution were one long torture. For sixteen more years, during which he worked upon and produced immortal classics of biology, he was the most wretched and unhappy sufferer from neurasthenia. His life was a continuous alternation of small doses of work and large doses of rest. So he was enabled to publish twenty-three volumes of original writing and fifty-one scientific papers. Living a sort of quasi-sanitarium life, with the rules and regulations of one undergoing a rest cure for thirty-six years, he thus accomplished infinitely more than the millions who have led the strenuous life. That he thus survived, as a genius, among the perils of an intellectual nature in an environment for which his adrenals sentenced him to destruction, must be put down in large measure to the ministrations and good sense of wife and children who supplied him with the endocrine energy he lacked. All these details I have given in the attempt to analyze the internal secretion constitution of this great man of genius, to establish that he really suffered from inadequate function of his adrenal glands, for the symptoms of chronic though benign adrenal insufficiency coincide in their mass effect with the story of his life. He was not a good animal, as Herbert Spencer declared was a first sine qua non of the successful life. He was a poor animal, the poorest of animals, because he possessed poor adrenals. What saved him was his congenitally superior pituitary (the nidus of genius) and the overacting thyroid, which combined to compensate to some extent for his fundamental lack. According to his son he rose early because he could not lie in bed, and he would have liked to get up earlier than he did.

What other hints have we that in spite of his fatigue disease he was a pituitocentric? The record of his physique and physiognomy, documentary and that left in portraits and photographs. He was tall and thin and his frame was naturally strong and large. Face was ruddy, and his grey eyes looked out from under deep overhanging brows and bushy eyebrows. The ears were large and prominent, the hair straight, the nose broad and well developed. All these are distinctive pituitary traits. The photograph of him taken by Maull and Fox in 1854 shows his chin to be the square firm kind that goes with the ante-pituitary type physique. (This photo is the frontispiece of the collection of essays entitled "Darwinism and Modern Science," edited by A.C. Seward and published in 1909). Charles Darwin, we may say, then, lived the life of one with a hyperfunctioning pituitary, the anterior portion dominating the posterior, a thyroid excess, and an adrenal much deficient, the combination settling the fate of a grand intellect in an invalid. It is interesting to note that an extant portrait of Erasmus Darwin, Darwin's distinguished grandfather, shows a pituitocentric, but with a rounder head and a fatter face, which point to a predominance of the post-pituitary over the ante-pituitary. Correspondingly, he was more speculative and poetic intellectually than his grandson, and more irascible and imperious in his moods.

After 1872, when Charles Darwin was sixty-three years old, a marked change for the better occurred in his health. For the last ten years of his life the condition of his health was a cause of satisfaction and hope to his family. "He was able to work more steadily with less fatigue and distress afterwards." This is probably to be explained as following the gonadopause hi him—the cessation of activity of the interstitial cells. After this event, the adrenals in the male nearly always function more efficiently, and well being is improved even though the blood pressure often rises coincidently. In the relative vigor of that decade we have another bit of evidence that the adrenals had much to say over Darwin's life.

EPILEPTIC GENIUS

He had a fever when he was in Spain
And, when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake: 'tis true, this god did shake
His coward lips did from their color fly;
And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world,
Did lose his lustre: I did hear him groan.

—Julius Caesar.

Epilepsy, the "falling sickness" or "fits," is generally associated with a deterioration or degeneration of mentality, and an inferior personality is frequently an ingredient. Progressively increasing data accumulate to incriminate more and more a disturbance of the endocrine balance, on the side of multiple deficiencies, as the basic mechanism at the bottom of a good many of them. Concurrent studies reveal that abnormalities of the thyroid, the parathyroids, the ovaries and testes, and even the thymus exist behind the attack. Investigation of the content of the consciousness of the different kinds of epilepsies from this point of view will doubtless bring to light some interesting information. There is much to be done for the epileptic with this new method of approach.

Epilepsy, just the same, may occur in men gifted with the sort of transcendent ability called genius. Mohammed, Lord Byron, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, to name a few cases, are famous instances. The point to be settled is whether epileptic genius, that is epilepsy with superior ability, occurs most often in pituitocentrics, the epilepsy being symptomatic of a pituitary struggling against barriers, tugging against bonds. As mentioned, in such cases epilepsy appears as the twin brother of migraine in genius. Should that be established, we should have more evidence for the pituitary dominance of most specimens of intellectual power. As a case in point let us take the most famous of the epileptic geniuses—Julius Caesar, "When the fit was on I marked how he did shake; tis true, this god did shake."

According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar was of slender build, fair-complexioned, pale, emaciated, of a delicate constitution (reminding us of Darwin), subject to severe headache and violent attacks of epilepsy. In view of the work of Cushing, the concurrence of "severe headache and violent attacks of epilepsy" is sharply suggestive of a pituitary origin for both. In his seventeenth year he was already engaged to be married, which proves his precocity. An overactive, erratic pituitary could here also be held responsible. Soon after he was proscribed by the dictator Sulla, and the first of a series of epileptic convulsions is recorded. Shock tries the pituitary, as well as the adrenals.

His sexual libido was of the quality that stimulated his soldiers to sing celebrations of his exploits. The first woman he was engaged to be jilted. Cornelia, his first wife, he divorced on the ground that "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." Matrimony committed twice thereafter landing him in the divorce court, he devoted himself to liaisons, one with Cleopatra. This sexual hyperactivity was probably another pituitary trait.

The compound of intellectual and practical ability he realized was of the rarest. It meant a most delicate balance between his ante-pituitary, post-pituitary, adrenals and thyroid. He was an orator, politician, historian, conqueror, and statesman. That his thyroid functioned well can be deduced from a career which involved more than three hundred personal triumphs as recognition from his native city. On horseback, riding without using his hands, he would often dictate to two or three secretaries at once. The masculine love of glory and ambition, expression of a well-working ante-pituitary, was combined with the effeminate echoes of an equally well-evolved post-pituitary. No prima donna was more concerned with the care of her skin, complexion and hair than he. The analogy extends even to superfluous hair which he had removed, not by the modern electrolysis, but by depilation with forceps and main force. The attendants at his bath would polish his epidermis, for his satisfaction, until it resembled alabaster or marble.

Caesar was not the kind of great man that Darwin was, and only a rather muddled careerist because he had too much adrenal and post-pituitary. But he was pituitocentric of a certain type. We possess no authentic portraits or busts of him to go by. But the bust in the Museum of Naples, for which he probably sat (some, H.G. Wells among them, will not accept this), presents the sort of face that is often seen in pituitary epileptics, and the features and skull of a pituitocentric: long, large, well-modeled head eyebrows prominent, with tendency to meet, aquiline nose and strong chin.

In these three, Napoleon, Nietzsche and Caesar, we have male pituitocentrics, exhibiting diversities of life and tastes because of differences in the co-working endocrine glands in their makeup. We shall consider now a female pituitocentric who presents the strangest contrasts in physique, physiognomy, conduct and character, dependent upon a variation in the balance between the two portions of the pituitary.

THE LEGEND OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

All biographies consist of prevarications and all autobiographies of fiction. That summing up of a mass of literature over which industrious students have ruined their eyes, held good until after the War, when things changed. Then Mr. Lytton Strachey, at one fell blow, and with one magnificent masterpiece, hurdled the old idols and established a new standard of deliberate accuracy in print. In his "Eminent Victorians" he set the pace for the host of those who have been stimulated by his good example, like Lady Margot Asquith.

Of the four Victorian respectable worthies Strachey has dissected as ruthlessly as the anatomist a post-mortem, his portrait of Florence Nightingale, the founder of the modern science and art of nursing, is most interesting because it provides data of the utmost value to the student of the endocrine basis of human personality. In the conventional two-volume biography of this superwoman, she is pictured as an intellectual saint, stepped from a stained glass window upon her wonderful visit to a clay-smeared earth. The biographer, presenting all the ins and outs of her body and soul as he has, makes her live before us with a fresh vitality that is startling.

The species of life Florence Nightingale lived, involving as it did struggle with a masculine world, and conquest of it, implies the existence in her of certain masculine traits and marks, for the normal feminine psyche is submissive rather than aggressive toward its environment, human and otherwise. Belonging to a family in the highest circles, it was upon the table d'hôte of her destiny that she should become a regulation debutante, careeristina, and successful wife and mother. Instead, she chose to question the whole routine of the life of her class, and in her diary she records her doubts and cravings, and her revolt against what is assumed by her family and friends to be the normal course of existence for her. The attitudes and questionings in these passages, the religious feeling displayed, are distinctly masculine. Most easily could the following, for instance, pass as having been written by a man: "I desire for a considerable time only to lead a life of obscurity and toil, for the purpose of allowing whatever I may have received of God to ripen, and turning it some day to the glory of His Name. Nowadays people are too much in a hurry both to produce and consume themselves. It is only in retirement, in silence, in meditation that are formed the men who are called to exercise an influence upon society." In a note-book she puts May 7, 1852, as the date upon which she was conscious of a call from God to be a saviour. Now the vast majority of women who have remained spinsters at 32, in spite of considerable personal attractions and high natural ability, are visited by waves of emotional fervor for a de-personalization of the self. But in the case of the subject, as Strachey has so well shown, the call was pursued with a self-willed, pitiless, unscrupulous determination, worthy of Satan himself upon the most ferocious evil bent. In its pursuit indeed she became what her latest biographer has called a "woman possessed by a Demon." All necessary, not alone because if she had been meek and mild she would have existed in futility, but because of the high percentage of the masculine endocrines in her composition. It is most regrettable that we have no statement of the findings of a gynecologic examination of her. That she was almost consciously masculine may be inferred not only from the way she bullied Lord Pannure and worked to death her dearest friend with the angelic temper, Sidney Herbert, who was so amiable that he could be driven by one who wrote: "I have done with being amiable. It is the mother of all mischief." She could also write, "I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act, and they make excuses."

Lytton Strachey has painted superbly all this in his essay. But for us his most significant passage is the following: "When old age actually came, something curious happened. Destiny, having waited patiently, played a queer trick upon Miss Nightingale. The benevolence and public spirit of that long life had only been equaled by its acerbity. Her virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured forth her unstinted usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And now the sacredness of years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was not to die as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her: she was to be made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and complacency. The change came gradually, but at last it was unmistakable."

"There appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical mould. The thin, angular woman, with her haughty eye, and her acrid mouth, had vanished, and in her place was the rounded, bulky form of a fat old lady, smiling all day long. Then something else became visible. The brain which had been steeled at Scutari was, indeed, literally growing soft. Senility—an ever more and more amiable senility—descended."

We have here an absolutely typical pituitary history, with another case of pituitocentric natural ability. What happens when pituitary hyperfunction or superiority becomes underfunction or inferiority is precisely as Strachey has described so cleverly of the "ministering angel": the acrid, thin and keen degenerate every time into the amiable, fat and dull. Just as Napoleon was transformed by the mutations of his pituitary, so was the Saint with the Lamp. And in both instances the contrasting modifications, from one extreme of glandular function to the other, supply us with the clue to the secret hand of their inner being and becoming, which worked upon the twists and turns of circumstance about them as a sculptor upon clay.

The official biography by Sir Edward Cook contains three portraits, representing three different stages, which bear out the pituitocentric thesis of her personality and life history. One as she was at 25, and pictured by Mrs. Gaskell: "She is tall; very straight and willowy in figure; thick and shortish rich brown hair; very delicate complexion … perfect teeth … perfect grace and lovely appearance … she is so like a saint." The face is long and oval, of the post-pituitary kind. Then gradually the ante-pituitary gained an ascendency in the concert of her internal secretions, so coloring her life with its masculine tints, and altering her face as well as her disposition. The photograph of her taken when she was 38 shows a quadrangular outline, and all the acridity that impressed Strachey. The last picture of her, a water color drawing made in 1907, shows a round visaged old dame, who might be the peasant grandmother of two dozen descendants. Little patches of red over the cheek bones remind one of myxedema and indicate that toward the very end of her life her thyroid failed her as well as her pituitary. So that our biographer relates: "Then by Royal Command, the Order of Merit was brought to South Street, and there was a little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson, after a short speech, stepped forward and handed the order of the insignia to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly recognized that some compliment was being paid her. 'Too kind—too kind!' she murmured; and she was not ironical." In the days of pituitary and thyroid hyperfunction we may be sure she would have been caustically and penetratingly ironical.

THE EXPLANATION OF OSCAR WILDE

The case of Oscar Wilde, as one of the high tragedies of English Literature and Life, attracted the attention of the whole world in its heyday, and even today evokes controversy. As a literary figure and artist, the poet of the Portrait of Dorian Gray, and "De Profundis," belongs without a doubt to the immortals. As a convicted criminal, who served for two years at hard labor in Reading jail, and afterwards, a prey to chronic alcoholism, died in obscurity in Paris, he still remains a subject of whispered conversation in private, and his crime a taboo to the public, mentionable only at the risk of arousing the terrible odium sexicum of the prurient majority. Oscar Wilde was a homosexual of a certain type. In view of the previously laid down considerations concerning the endocrine genesis of homosexuality, how are we to explain him, and his natural history?

As with the other exemplars of genius examined we need here, too, to gain some insight into his "internal secretion heredity." His father, Sir William Wilde, was a surgeon. Photographs of him show the long and broad face of a pituito-adrenal centered individual, with a corresponding duplex incarnation in the face, the upper half strikingly spiritual, the lower curiously animal.

He was active, practical and eminently successful. His wife recalls Florence Nightingale, in face, figure and conduct (people who are built alike as regards their internal secretions are those whom we recognize as similar physically and psychically). She, too, was a pituito-adrenal, and in so far resembled her husband. But as in a woman ante-pituitary and adrenal superiority make for masculinity, she must be classed as a masculinoid type of woman. She was socially aggressive, and took part in the revolutionary movement of her time in Ireland. Thus we find that Oscar Wilde was the result of a mating of internal secretions acting in the same direction. The process might be compared to parthenogenesis.

It is on record that when enceinte his mother often expressed the wish that her child be a girl. When a boy was born, she was immensely disappointed. To compensate for her disappointment, she brought him up a good deal like a little girl. She had him dressed in girls' clothes at an age when most boys are violent destroyers of clothing. She would hang massive jewelry upon him, for the delight of playing with the resultant stage picture as a satisfaction for her discontented desires. In the light of modern psychology, and our formulization of her endocrine status, we must put down her conduct to a suppressed homosexual craving. Had her son been built along the lines of strong emphatic masculinity, her influence, though vicious, would probably have found no congenial soil, and would have died out altogether after his contacts with the outer world, beginning with school. No matter how she would have conditioned his vegetative system temporarily, his internal secretions, released then from compression, would have asserted themselves and determined his fate differently. However, it is quite possible that if such had been the case Oscar Wilde, the aesthete, the paradoxer, the disciple of Walter Pater and Baudelaire, would have stayed in the land of the to be born. I mean that then we would not have had Oscar Wilde, but another person, genius or commonplace, who also might have borne the name of Oscar Wilde.

That was not to be. The singular assortment of endocrines that mingled their activities to make Oscar Wilde shaped a personality which we must classify as the thymocentric (thymus-centered). Why this should be so is an interesting question. Pituito-adrenal plus pituito-adrenal of his heredity should make two pituito-adrenals according to elementary arithmetic and the rule of three. A cancellation of the two factors of the equation rather than addition seems to have occurred. The result was a persistent thymus superiority, with an instability of the other two main glands involved.

How do we know that Oscar Wilde was a thymocentric? Because in his fullest development he exhibited all the earmarks of the thymus pattern. We possess a number of good pictures and descriptions of him, as he was really a contemporary, and would probably be alive today if he had been put in a hospital for proper treatment instead of in prison. An excellent description is that of Henri de Regnier's: "This foreigner (Wilde) was tall, and of great corpulence. A high complexion seemed to give still greater width to his clean shaven face. It was the unbearded (glabre) face that one sees on coins. The hands … were rather fleshy and plump." The points of immediate interest are the height, the complexion and the beardlessness. One classic variety of the thymocentric is tall, has a baby's skin, and has little or no hair on the face. A passage from a narrative written by one of his warders confirms the last condition decidedly. "Before leaving his cell to see a visitor, he was alway careful to conceal, as far as possible, his unshaven chin by means of his red handkerchief." Bristles on the chin, with little or none on the cheeks, is the inference. It is important to stress the thymocentric significance of this glabrosity of the face. Another sign to be put in italics was the quality of his voice. It has been described as a beautiful tenor, when he had it under perfect control, and high pitched and strident when under the influence of passion or temper. Such a voice would be the product of a larynx remaining partly or completely in the infantile state, as in a woman's. That, and the large breasts he is said to have had, point again to the thymus-centered constitution. All in all, there can be no doubt that Oscar Wilde was a case of status lymphaticus, the technical name for the thymus-centered personality.

As happens in a number of thymocentrics, his pituitary must have attempted to compensate for the endocrine deficiencies always present in them. The exceptional size of his head was a pituitary trait. Finding, possibly making, plenty of room for itself to grow, for some unknown reason, in an extraordinary fashion, it reinforced the love of the beautiful that is part of the feminine post-pituitary nature, with an intellectual ability and maturity that was at first all-conquering. In the face of a society organized for pure masculine and pure feminine types, disgrace and disaster at last overtook him with almost the ruthlessness of natural selection wiping out an unadapted sport suddenly cropping up in an environment. In prison he suffered from severe splitting headaches, which were probably due to changes in his pituitary. Described as being directly over the eyes, they haunted him until his death, and may have had a good deal to do with the absinthe addiction he acquired.

THE TREATMENT OF GENIUS

The problem of Oscar Wilde raises an ethical question that still remains to be finally answered. Granting that all of society should one day see him and his kind as a peculiar and specific constitutional product of an odd intermixture of internal secretions, what should be done with him and them? It is easy to play with words like "degenerates." But still, we do not condemn imbeciles, idiots or defectives, or other substandard, subnormal creatures to the prisons. For the sake of the good opinion society would maintain of itself, it sends the latter nowadays to hospitals, sanitaria, or their equivalents, where protection for itself without punishment for them may be practised. But is confinement, or even treatment the solution? For we have to consider what society would lose by cutting such abnormals off from itself, and them from its stimulations. A number of artists have been built like Oscar Wilde, musicians in particular. Without them, would there not be a great gap, a yawning absence, in the world's culture?

Modern diagnosis and modern therapy might have done a great deal for Napoleon, Nietzsche, Julius Caesar, Florence Nightingale, Oscar Wilde. Were they alive today, and willing to submit themselves to scientific scrutiny, the X-ray would tell us of the state of the pituitary and thymus in them, chemical examinations of the blood the condition of the thyroid and adrenals, detailed investigation of the body and mind a flood of light upon their maladies as well as their personalities. Therapy might have relieved Napoleon of his attacks, and so, halting the creeping degeneration of his pituitary, made Waterloo impossible. But then, would we have had the Emperor at all? Would there have been enough of that instability that drives on the genius to his goal? Nietzsche might have been relieved of his headaches, and Caesar of his epilepsy—but then, would not—with correction of the underlying streams of activity on the part of the other glands of the internal secretion to compensate—their peculiar superiority and distinction, and the fruits of their lives as by-products, have been destroyed. Florence Nightingale, too, might have been a softer and more human person. But then would she have revolutionized the practice of nursing? Oscar Wilde possibly might have been made over into a heterosexual. But then would not the world be the poorer without "De Profundis," let us ask? To state the problem in the most general terms: how much abnormality are we to tolerate (I speak, of course, of malignant abnormality, and disregard benign abnormality altogether) for the sake of the valuable that is concomitant? How much are we to stand of that which degrades the germ-plasm while it raises the mind-plasm of the race? The Flowers of Evil. Destroy or modify the roots, change the seed, and the buds will bloom, if at all, not orchids, but dull brown commonplaces.

What means may be licensed for the attainment of a worthy end is perhaps the broadest aspect of the problem. The instruments of Man's ascent to divinity may arouse his instinctive repulsions, dislikes, and destructive passions. The study of the internal secretions is putting and will put the most powerful apparatus for the control of the abnormal into our hands. What are we going to do with them?

It does not follow that because we are beginning to understand the normal that we are to establish one fixed absolute standard of the normal. In view of all the possible mixtures, permutations and combinations of the endocrine glands, that may construct an individual, it is possible to conceive a million types of normals. For normality means harmony, the harmonious equilibrium between the hormones, which tends to continue itself, because it does no harm to itself. So there are all sorts and conditions of men and women who are classed as normals. We need create no inquiry into the value of raising the subnormal to the normal level. It is when we come to consider the possibility of lowering the supernormal (in certain respects) to the normal, that we pause and hesitate. Traditional morality assists not, but hinders us here.

Whatever the race may ultimately decide, it is safe to predict that it is now somewhat possible, and will become more and more possible, to regulate or even check the ills of genius, without interfering with its highest evolution and expression. For example, Bernard Shaw, to take a living man of genius, is pretty visibly a pituitocentric of the well-balanced variety. He has the height, the facial features, the hands, and the sort of mentality that run together in his endocrine make-up. He also has the headaches. It is quite probable that feeding him pituitary gland extract in the proper dosage would relieve him of his headaches. A process might be started in his pituitary, however, that would diminish its extraordinary output which has assisted to make his brain so brilliant. The possibility, nevertheless, is excessively remote as the pituitary predominance in him is so overwhelming, that nothing short of surgery, nature's or the medical graduate's, could really affect that overmastering eminence. The time will come, though it is not yet by a long, long road, when we shall be able to intervene, and perhaps meddle, in nature's most intimate plans. The right of the power to modify, like the power to kill, will be defined and limited by common agreement before that goal will be reached.