The congenital adrenal deficient is a special problem. If the history of such an individual is followed from birth, one gets a pretty typical story. The genealogy is nervous. Nervous is a word of many meanings. But when parents confess themselves nervous, it generally means a mental and emotional instability of some sort. Sometimes the idea is camouflaged as high strung. In the feeding narrative of the child, one finds not occasional incidents or episodes, but continued trouble, difficulties, adventures. Even after the first year or two, the nutritional chronicle is not satisfactory. Lack of appetite, lack of energy, lack of response to stimuli are its keynotes and the motifs of the later years of childhood.
Growth is a strain. It becomes a task to make these children grow and gain. Chronically below the average weight and height, herculean efforts are made by the conscientious parents, but with small success.
With the entry of school life and competition, the curtain rises upon the real tragedy, a tragedy in which the avenging Fates are the usual ignorance, stupidity and misunderstanding. If the teachers alone are duty-obsessed, or perhaps sadistic, the child endures the agonies of repeated admonitions, demotions, and punishments. However, a certain thick-skinned indifference may develop to protect the sufferer.
If the parents are in addition ambitious, or proud, or competitive, then woe betide the victim. With their nervous dispositions, it is the school and the tutor who are to be blamed, if not the child. From school to school, from system to system, from novelty to fad, from doctor to doctor, from fakir to charlatan, from pillar to post, they wander in search of an education. Educational cults by the dozen have sprouted and grown fat around these unfortunates.
The chief defect of the congenital adrenal inadequate is an insufficiently developed adrenal cortex. That means an insufficiently developed brain and nervous system. For we have seen how closely all these are related in development. Now education can never be the education of a vacuum. And we have to deal here with a relative vacuum. When there are no potentialities, there can be no education. Where the potentialities are limited, education must be limited. The congenital adrenal inadequate is defined in physical and mental energy. Hence educators cannot drive him. Up to a certain point he can be led, but no farther. He should not be expected to go to a college, and waste the opportunity of some one financially unlucky, but whose endocrine system is more generously endowed.
Not that the outlook is absolutely hopeless. Puberty, with its tremendous changes in the glands of internal secretion, when one can almost hear the clicks and the whirring of the wheels in the internal machinery, may transform. The unfathomed possibilities of gland therapy are still to be probed. But the general rule remains.
THE REACTIONS TO MODERNISM
The adrenal personalities in all their variations must be safeguarded and carefully looked after in the strained complexities of modern post-bellum civilization. In a sense, the adrenal type is the Atlas of the twentieth century world, and small wonder that he and his descendants stagger beneath the burden. The adrenals are organs for the mobilization of energy, physical and mental, for emergencies. They are the glands which meet shocks and neutralize the effects of shock. In the solitary animal, the everyday producers of shock are pain, fright and wounds. The adrenal mechanisms oversecrete to encounter the enemy, and then there is a period of rest and recuperation. Man, however, with the growth of his imagination and the increase in number and density of his surrounding herd, has become the subject of continuous stimulation. In the past, this was balanced by the almost universal dominance of some religious belief, as an effective opiate. Concepts like Fate, Predestination, an all-guiding and all-wise Providence, relieved and shielded the adrenals, and acted as valuable adjuvants for the preservation of normality.
The nineteenth century witnessed the birth and expansion of a great number of new stimulant reagents, the discoveries of physics and chemistry, which, with the climax of the World War of 1914-1918, have made for a more or less complete deliquescence of accepted religion. For the great majority there was no faith to take its place. War, pre-war, and post-war shocks have continued with their incessant pounding upon the reserves of energy. Under these conditions the adrenal personalities are bound to suffer. The other endocrine types suffer, too, but quite differently.
Today, anti-adrenal, anti-religious ideas are epidemic. Of these, first prize belongs to a cult of egotism fathered by the Napoleonic Idea, consciously assertive and self-conscious in Max Stirner's "The Ego and His Own," which engendered a swarm of imitators and plagiarists. Human beings are all incorrigible egoists more or less, furtive or frank. But social and religious codes curbed the most narcissistic of kings and conquerors. Before Napoleon, all of them vowed allegiance and expressed submission to some sort of deity, confessed some fear of the Lord in their hearts. But the ideas of Napoleon flouted all that. The unscrupulous predatory who put effectual scheming for the self plainly above every other consideration and rode rough shod over all his fellows appealed powerfully to the latent animality of the adrenal types. Then came the dawning awareness of capital and labor of themselves as classes fiercely opposed forever in the policy of cut-throat versus cut-throat. The labor organizations and the commercial companies and corporations pitted themselves against each other consciously. Doctrines like "Property is but Robbery," "Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost," the "Iron Law of Wages" and the "Facts is Facts" of the Gradgrinds were the phrases of the nineteenth century that assisted. Finally came the Darwinian revelation of man as the ape-parvenu, which completed the disintegration of the old restraints.