The character of the confinement, its duration, and the uses to which it will be put should be dominated by the idea of discovering the unknown criminal predisposition. If crime is an abnormality scientifically studiable and controllable like measles, court procedure and prison management will have to be transformed radically. There is scattered throughout the world now a group of people who are applying medical methods to the diagnosis and treatment of crime. They are the pioneers who will be remembered in history as the compeers of those who transformed the attitudes toward insanity and its therapy. The insane were once condemned and handled as criminals are in most civilized countries yet. The criminologic laboratory as an adjunct to the court of justice, like that associated with the court of Chief Justice Olson in Chicago, remains to be universalized. What contribution to a more rational treatment of the criminal will the study of the internal secretions make?
It has been shown that the greater number of convicts are mentally and morally subnormal. To explain the subnormality, the criminologist has conducted and will continue to conduct investigations into the heredity and early environment of the criminal, his education and occupation, the social and religious influences to which he was subjected, and the intelligence test quotient. The conditioning of the vegetative system and the endocrine status of the prisoner, however, will without a doubt come to occupy the leading positions in any interpretation of crime in the future.
Introspective observation of pre-criminal states of mind by so-called normal persons reveals that in many of them there is an impairment of reason and will power, in others an exaltation amounting almost to hysteria. What are these but endocrine states of the cells, experimentally reproducible by increasing or decreasing the influence of the thyroid, the adrenals, the pituitary? Crimes of passion may be traced in no small part to disturbances of the thyroid. A psychologic examiner of a Pittsburgh court, interested in the subject, has found an enlarged thyroid in over ninety per cent of delinquent girls. Similarly, crimes of violence may be ascribed to a profound break in the adrenal equilibrium. Criminal tendencies in women during menstruation and pregnancy, periods of deep-seated mutation in the internal glandular system, have long been noted. A kleptomania, uncontrollable desire to steal, confined to the duration of pregnancy alone, has been described. We have seen how the thymocentric, especially if he possesses a small bony case for his pituitary, is predisposed to crime. A recent study of twenty murderers in the State of West Virginia showed them all to have a persistent thymus and the thymocentric constitution. A study of the recidivists, those who return for second and third offences, in one institution, disclosed that a large majority had a subnormal temperature and an increased heart and breathing rate. These are endocrine-controlled functions. Conduct, normal or abnormal, being the resultant of the conflict of conscious and subconscious impulses and inhibitions, the internal secretions as controllers of the susceptibility of the brain cells to impulses and inhibitions, must be held accountable for a portion at least of the chemical reactions behind crime.
It is possible, by X-ray treatment of the thymus, to cause it to shrink to more normal proportions. It is possible, by feeding various glandular extracts, to correct deficiencies or excesses of their function, and so to remedy the underlying basis for a criminal career. Here and there work of this kind has been successfully carried out in selected instances. What a suitable drive upon the whole matter would yield in happiness to the individual and dollars and cents to society, time alone will show.
CHAPTER XIII
THE EFFECT UPON HUMAN EVOLUTION
The ubiquitous and deep-seated influence of the internal secretions upon life and personality comprises but a fraction of what is known, and only a hint of what is to become known. There is an endocrine aspect to every human being and every human activity, normal and abnormal, internal process and its external expression, regulated by laws of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse. Their control promises us now a dominion over the most intimate and inaccessible recesses of our lives in a way comparable only to the control we now exercise over the forces and energies once revered as the instruments of the gods—light, heat, magnetism, electricity. We have learned how to control and change our environment. We are now learning, endocrine research is now discovering, how to control and change ourselves.
The story of the evolution of the two types of control has many analogies. When man ceased looking upon his surroundings as inhabited by spirits of good and evil, as he conceived himself, and discovered that they were composed of things malleable and analysable in his hands, he became their master. When now he drops the old superstitions about himself as a spirit, an emulsion of a spirit of good and spirit of evil, and sees himself more and more clearly as the most complex of chemical reactions, regulated and determined as are the simple and complex chemical reactions around him, he will begin to rule and modify himself as he rules and modifies them. Whether or not he will ultimately come to this final lucidity of thought and action, it behooves us to consider some of the uses to which our present knowledge might be put.
Since every step of the daily routine or adventure, from waking to sleeping, eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, working, idling, fighting, playing, feeling, enjoying, sorrowing, every shade of emotion and nuance of mood, in short every phase of happiness and unhappiness, are endocrine episodes in the life history of the individual, the sphere of applications is as long and broad and deep as life itself. Not only do the internal secretions open up before us the great hope—that Life at last will cease to stumble and grope and blunder, manacled by the iron chains of inexorable cause and effect. They provide tools, concrete and measurable, that can be handled and moved, weighed and seen, for the management of the problems of human nature and evolution.
Every department of human life, the questions of labor and industry, science and art, education, puericulture, international problems, crime and disease, may be illuminated. War and Sex, those two master interests of mankind, may be understood and handled sympathetically as they have never before. The reactions of man alone, and man in the crowd, will be clarified. The red thread of individuality which runs through the woof and warp of all human affairs will be unraveled.