Narcotism, the craving for narcotic or stimulant drugs, and its subvariety, alcoholism, has been found most often among the thymocentrics. Any type of endocrine inferiority, interfering with success in life, may lead to the habit of drug addiction as one way out. But the blood and tissues of the thymocentric appear to become habituated to the narcotic stimulant more easily than the other types, and so to demand it with a physical imperative comparable to the food or sex urge. Among artists, philosophers and statesmen, on the other hand, actively productive and so contrasted with criminals and degenerates drug addiction has frequently been a mode of endocrine compensation. That is, the drug produced temporarily the effects of the internal secretion lacking or insufficient. Thus the effects of cocaine may be compared with the effects of thyroid. But while there is a normal mechanism for thyroid detoxication, the cocaine or heroin derivatives mark the tissues permanently with their scars and deform the personality.
THE HYGIENE OF THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS
All these protean expressions of endocrine determination may now begin to be looked upon with the hopeful and optimistic attitude of him who understands cause and effect and can control. The advances made in the last ten years in the practical manipulation of the ductless glands from without, the introduction of glandular extracts by feeding or injection, and the modification of their structure and function by surgery, the X-ray and radium, and other procedures, enable us to regard more confidently the problems hitherto accepted as the insoluble and intricate handiwork of Fate. Fate may have woven the patterns of our being. But as we commence to probe the machinery and to examine the looms more carefully, we begin to understand why the wheels creak, and why there are seconds and odd lots in the product as well as the rare and precious firsts. Moreover, we are learning how to handle the machinery ourselves. The abdication of Fate can therefore be confidently expected in due time.
However, we have yet to begin, and we can begin with prevention. The theory of Adler, that some organ inferiority is responsible for much unhappiness in life has received much advertisement in conjunction with the doctrines of the Freudians. It is a theory of little scope when applied to the eyes, ears, heart and so on because only a small minority of the cases are of that kind. But as we have seen, a deficiency of an internal secretion, an endocrine inferiority, reverberates throughout all the cells. Not only the mind, but all of the members of the organism must strain and co-operate to make up for the break in the balance.
Endocrine inferiority is indeed the most frequent organic inferiority. And we may explain a number of mental types upon that basis. Thus the inferior gonado-centric, who has something wrong with his reproductive organs, will evolve in one of two directions. If his adrenal and thyroid are of poor quality, he will become the secluded introvert, shut off from the interests of normal life. He will enter the borderland of insanity if pituitary difficulties supervenes. If, on the contrary, the adrenal, thyroid and pituitary are present in a certain proportion, he will become the active, aggressive, never-resting, keen, and relentless fanatic reformer. A woman who is gonad deficient with a superior adrenal will suffer from virilism and specialize in the extreme tactics and mythology of the feminist movement. A number of life reactions are classifiable as the strivings of endocrine inferior individuals to overcome their sense of inferiority. The unconscious vegetative system and the system of consciousness are both modified by the weakness of a link in the glandular chain.
What, therefore, is to be recommended in the prophylaxis of the natural deterioration of the wells of life, the ductless glands? For even if we may be able to replenish them when they dry up, would it not be better to delay their dessication? The hormones reply to every call of life and respond in every reaction. The normal constructive process of their cells remanufactures what has been lost, and the original capacity to respond is restored. If, though, the rate of destruction and loss outruns the rate of repair and construction, they will be permanently damaged. This is what occurs in shock, serious, severe accidents and injuries, prolonged infections and diseases, profound continued emotions, and the wear and tear of overwork. The prevention of these excessive fatigues of the endocrine system in one or all of its parts, and especially the prevention and enfeeblement of the diseases of children which injure them at a period when they are most sensitive to injury, is the task of the endocrine hygienist. Periodic examinations, to check up the balance sheets of the hormone factories and to measure the amount of their damage by means of blood analyses, will provide the most valuable method in the campaign to lengthen the productive and enjoying span of life.
THE TREATMENT OF CRIME
Endocrine hygiene will discover no wider or more fruitful area for exploration and control than that of crime. For more than a generation there have been attempts at a criminology, and a new understanding and control of crime. In the United States a concomitant sentimentalism has concocted measures like the honor system which, naturally failing of their purpose, have undermined confidence in the idea of scientific diagnosis and treatment of crime. As someone has noted, to ask a criminal to promise not to misbehave, when discharged from prison, is like asking a typhoid fever patient to promise not to have a temperature above ninety-nine degrees the next morning. For a large proportion of criminals—the percentage has yet to be determined, although the most recent police commissioner of Chicago has estimated it at ninety per cent—punishment for a period of time and then letting him go free is like imprisoning a diphtheria carrier for a while and then permitting him to commingle with his fellows and spread the germ of diphtheria.
Of course, the doctrine of responsibility is all tangled up with our attitude towards and treatment of crime. Though clear thought makes mandatory the recognition of a universal cause and effect law, practical common sense has defined free will. Consent or the withholding of consent to a given course of action has been the criterion of responsibility.
In practice, the limitation of responsibility will depend upon the insertion of extraneous factors into the formula of consent. The pragmatic test has been and will be the probability that the correction of the somatic or psychic condition would have prevented or will prevent the consent to the crime. As long as no such condition will be demonstrable, society for its own protection will have to confine the unfortunate individual.