Man seemed to see himself now for the first time stark and naked. But Man consists of many varieties, and all reacted differently to the image in the clouded mirror. There was universal attempt at suppression. But slowly the anti-adrenal forces infiltrated every activity and every soul. Like a hidden focus of infection in the body, it germinated and poisoned. A slow fever crept into life. A febrile quality tinged the acquisition of wealth, the concentration upon sex, and the desperate pursuit of the novel stimulus.
Then, like the hand that appeared at Belshazzar's Feast, came the War, only it was a hand that stayed with a long flashing lightning sword in its grip, sweeping pitilessly among the erstwhile dancing multitudes to mutilate and destroy. A good many people, with that sturdy animality George Santayana speaks somewhere of as a trait of mankind, set out to enjoy the War. It was a new sort of good time upon an incredibly large scale. It was an undreamed-of opportunity. The mechanisms of suppression of the mind render it incapable of appreciating horror until encountered. And so thousands with dangerously unstable adrenals were plunged into the most trying conditions possible. Hundreds of them, already shaken, on the borderland of instability, reacted with the phenomena of breakdown of control, lumped with a host of other phenomena, under the general rubric of "shell shock."
That alone was not all. If hundreds collapsed, thousands approached the verge of collapse. They survived and were discharged from the armies as normal. They reappear in civil life as cases of "nerves." Ordinarily that would mean that they would be classed as failures. But such have been the psychologic reactions to the war that all kinds of compensations in the way of dangerous mental states have become frequent in these inadequate adrenal types. A trend to violence and a resentful emotionalism are combined with desperate attempts to spur the jaded adrenals with artificial excitements. Consequent melancholia and depression, the "blues," are inevitable. A survey of drug addicts would probably show a definite percentage of this type. The same applies to certain petty criminals and law breakers.
The adrenal element in the personality must be considered in every disturbance, morbid, personal, or social involving brunette types, Huxley's dark white, Mediterranean-Iberians, red-haired persons, and even pigment-spotted fair people. Historians have traced the earliest civilization to the doings of a brunette people, the Sumerians, the first to build cities in the Euphrates-Tigris region more than five thousand years before Christ was born. An adrenalized people one would, expect to be the first to take advantage of possibilities because of their energy capacity. The earliest Sumerian stone carvings of warriors exhibit an undersized skeleton compared with the large head, broad face, a low hair line and prominent nose that would fit into the ensemble of the adrenal type. Certain other historical aspects of the adrenal personality have yet to be worked out.
THE PITUITARY PERSONALITIES
The presence of two antagonistic elements in the one gland complicates any attempt at even the most abstract analysis of a personality dominated by that gland. The pituitary, composed of an anterior lobe and posterior lobe, supplies two fairly uncomplicated corresponding types, best described as the masculine pituitary type, and the feminine pituitary type. The masculine pituitary type is one determined by the rule of the anterior pituitary, representing superlative brain tone and action, good all-around growth and harmonious general function, the ideal masculine organism. The feminine pituitary type has an excess of post-pituitary, with susceptibility to the tender emotions, sentimentalism, and emotionalism, feminine structural lines. Ante-pituitary dominance in a male reinforces the general masculinity while the post-pituitary depresses it. The post-pituitary in a woman augments her natural trend, ante-pituitary tending to counteract it. In other words, post-pituitary and ovary are conjunctive, ante-pituitary and ovary are disjunctive, post-pituitary and testis are opponents, ante-pituitary and testis are allies.
One mechanical circumstance involved in the pituitary personalities may be the determinant of the entire life history. That is the emphasized fact that the pituitary is encased in a small bony box, at the base of the skull. The size of this bony box, and its capacity to yield to the various pressures of a pituitary enlarging to meet the demands of the organism, will often spell happiness or misery, success or failure, genius or idiocy for the man or woman. Certain possibilities are conceivable. All of them occur, for the developments of X-ray technique have rendered available almost a direct view of the sella turcica.
In the first place, the bony box may be definitely too small to start in with. That means a small and so potentially inadequate pituitary, both anterior and posterior, potentially inadequate in that it will become impossible for it to grow and produce extra secretion upon demand. Handicapped thus, the unfortunate so born is doomed to inferiority and very little can be done for him. He will not develop satisfactorily. He possesses small genital organs which will not evolve properly in adolescence, or if they will not stand still, tend to revert to the opposite sex type. Then he tends to be dwarfed, fatigable, adipose. Among these types are included subjects of obsessions and compulsions who are dull and apathetic, cannot learn or maintain inhibitions, and so, without initiative, evolve into moral and intellectual degenerates, liable to epilepsy and the most remarkable sex aberrations. All because a cranny of the skull, about the size of a thimble, is not large enough for their dominating gland.
If the bone of the cavity of the pituitary is softer and yielding, so that some enlargement of the gland is possible, especially of the anterior, there appear rapid growth with a tendency to high blood pressure, great mental activity associated with frequent and severe headaches (often of the migraine type), a combination of initiative and irritability and a marked sexuality. X-ray examination of the sella turcica shows what is called erosion of the bone as it yields to the pressure of the growing gland.
The ideal sella turcica for the ideal pituitary type is a large room in which the gland may grow and reach its maximum size and so its maximum function, without needing to exert pressure or destroy and erode bone in front of it, to the side of it or behind it. The distinctive masculine and feminine types, classed as the normal, belong to this group. Sometimes, the bone in front of the pituitary will yield, while the one in the rear will not, and sometimes the conditions are reversed. Thus we may have ante-pituitary sufficiency with post-pituitary insufficiency, or ante-pituitary insufficiency with post-pituitary sufficiency, complexes which contribute to create the grosser functional hermaphrodite types of mixed sex.