We know that these interstitial glands, to stick to that name, (rather than to the name of the puberty glands, since they serve not only to induce puberty but to maintain maturity) are the actual primary dictators of the process by which male and female are distinguished, if not created. Castration was probably the first surgical operation carried out for experimental purposes, suggested no doubt by a curiosity concerning its effects. Trepanning of the skull, the geologic record indicates, was done even by the cave man. But as an experimental operation, castration seems to hold the primary position in the annals of surgery.
Its effects noted, the satisfaction of one of the lower human instincts, jealousy, popularised it. From the days of Semiramis, eunuchs have been commonplace figures of the East, their function definite: to guard the harems of the powerful. The age of Abdul Hamid witnessed no diminution of the barbaric tortures by which children are prepared for the profession. It is to the credit of England that in its dominions in the Orient the practice has been abolished. But it goes on even today. According to the best authorities, four out of five of these victims at the auto-da-fe of a vicious human instinct die immediately or soon after from exhaustion due to pain and infection. Not all of the ancient nations countenanced the brutal horror. The Hebrews placarded castration an unpardonable sin, making it a sin to castrate even animals. Nor was any man so mutilated permitted to worship in the house of the Lord (Deuteronomy xxiii, 11). Yet we have evidence that the latter Jewish kings employed foreign eunuchs in their harems, who often held the most important positions as ministers of the court.
Besides the eunuchs, another group of people have presented material for the study of the interstitial glands. These are the Skoptzi of Russia and the Lipowaner of Roumania. Among them castration is a religious ritual. Mankind has always been most brutal to itself in the name of the ideal. These sects were founded because in the eighteenth century an antipode of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young discovered this passage in Matthew xix, 12.
"For there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother's womb, and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."
He decided that he was inspired to spread the gospel of castration. A sect was founded who thought that surgery was the easiest way to enter the gates of Paradise, and they multiplied and fructified. The sect exists today, and some of the most interesting studies of the internal secretion of the interstitial glands have been made among them.
Related to acquired eunuchism is the condition of eunuchoidism, the eunuchs which were so born from their mother's womb. Baron Larey, the great surgeon of Napoleon's armies, was their first painter. He was the only altruist Bonaparte said he had ever met in his life. He portrayed a group of soldiers with peculiarly high-pitched voices, smooth and hairless skins, and atrophied generative organs. A somewhat similar picture is evolved in certain types of insufficiency of the pituitary gland. Features of the picture are exhibited with disturbances of the other internal secretory glands also, like the thymus.
But a host of experiments and data prove the interstitial glands to be the direct controllers of elementary sexuality and the specific sex traits of male and female. Beginning with Berthold back in the first half of the nineteenth century, who studied the fowl, a number of observations have been made on the effects of excision, translocation and transplantation of these glands.
The results of the experiments and observations can be summed up as follows: if the male individual is castrated before puberty, that is, before the advent of the sexual life, secondary sex qualities do not develop. In males, the generative organs do not grow, hair on the face does not appear, hair elsewhere on the body remains generally scanty, the voice continues as high-pitched as the child's, there is more or less muscle weakness, obesity, and mental sluggishness. In other words, we have an effeminate man, technically a eunuch. In the castrated female, the pelvis does not grow to the normal feminine size, the breasts do not swell as they should, more or less hair comes out on the face, the voice is low-pitched, and tends to be rather husky, the legs are longer, and again, the mentality is dulled. That is, a masculine sort of woman is produced.
In short, the castrated male takes on a feminine type, and the castrated female, a male type. In either case there is also an infantilism, a retention of the infantile mental traits, a lack of development of the adult mental attitudes and reactions. Now, if in the castrated male is transplanted an ovary, the positive characteristics of the female are evoked, such as enlarged mammary glands, and a tendency to secretion of milk. Experiments have also been reported in which a uterus was also placed in such an animal, with a means of entry, and pregnancy followed. If in the castrated female a testicle is planted, the masculine traits become much more marked and striking. A direct exchange of the male and female rôles can thus be achieved. Castration after puberty cannot modify profoundly structures like the skeleton which are already completed. Yet it may unquestionably bring about definite retrogressive changes in the secondary sex characters: reduction or loss of virility, diminution of facial and body hair, and a general presenility or hastening of senility.
How remarkably these interstitial cells influence the entire structure and vitality of the organism is indicated by these facts. How much they have to do with sexual impulses, sexual excitement, and sexual desire, what the Freudians have popularized as the libido, and how subtly they act upon the coming and duration of adolescence and maturity, as well as sexual precocity and peversions, we shall consider in a later chapter. But it is enough now to remember that these interstitial glands are the primary dictators of the genital sense and flair of the individual. In any attempt at measurement of men and women, the quality and quantity of the internal secretion of the interstitial cells must be respected as a fundamental consideration. The womanly woman and the manly man, those ideals of the Victorians, which crumbled before the attack of the Ibsenites, Strindbergians and Shavians in the nineties, but which must be recognized as quite valid biologically, are the masterpieces of these interstitial cells when in their perfection. They are such solely because of the right concentration in the blood of the substances manufactured not only by these cells, but by all the glands of internal secretion. For it cannot be repeated and emphasized too often that the interstitial cells of the sex glands are most sensitive to all kinds of other influences, and, in particular, the other internal secretory organs. They may indeed be watched as an index scale or barometer of the general tone of the whole internal secretion system. Sex variations offer a variety of clues to variations, disturbances, predominances and abnormalities in all the components of the ductless gland association.