CHAPTER XI
SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES
THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS IN HISTORY
According to the views, facts and guesses concerning human personality, as a body-mind complex dominated by the internal secretions, outlined in the preceding pages, biography, and human history as the interaction of biographies, become capable of interpretation from a new standpoint. If human life, in its essentials, is so much the product of the internal messenger system we speak of as the endocrines, then biography should present us with a number of illustrations of their power and influence. What is the evidence that, as Huxley anticipated, "the introduction into the economy of a molecular mechanism which, like a cunningly contrived torpedo, shall find its way to some particular group of living elements, and cause an explosion among them, leaving the rest untouched," and the multiplication of such cunningly contrived mechanisms, were responsible for those personalities, magnificent chemical compounds, with whose adventures historians are concerned?
THE CASE OF NAPOLEON
As a unique will and intelligence, Napoleon Bonaparte the First must be classed as one of the Betelegeuses of the race. H.G. Wells has called his career the "raid of an intolerable egotist across the disordered beginning of a new time." "The figure of an adventurer and wrecker." "This saturnine egotist." "Are men dazzled simply by the scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?" "This dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar." There are other opinions. The Man of Destiny was worshipped by millions. Napoleona bring fortunes today. Interest in the man as a man has multiplied with every year. And certainly no one can deny him the quality of individuality in its most exaggerated form.
In the second place he belongs among the moderns. Modern science and methods of observation have had their chance at him, and have left a conscious record of their results. Napoleon was the central figure of his time, and was watched by trained medical eyes during his life, and after his death. Protocols of the examination of his body are accessible, and Napoleonic specimens, preserved by fixing agents, may still be viewed at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, England. Dr. Leonard Guthrie has worked up the material at hand in a report which he presented to the historical section of the International Congress of Medicine, in London in 1913. I propose to relate his findings to some other facts and the general principles roughly sketched in this book.
There are a number of word portraits of Napoleon extant. But for our purposes certain of the notable features of his face and physique are to be considered. The first characteristic that struck everyone about him was the matter of his height. He was definitely sub-average, at death being about five feet six inches in height. As has been emphasized several times, deficiency or excess of growth will always direct attention to the pituitary. His sharply outlined features and a powerful lower jaw, combined with oddly small plump hands, long straight black hair, and dark complexion, all point to the pituitary, with a secondary adrenal effect. His pulse was slow, according to Corvisart, his personal physician, rarely above 50 to the minute. His sexual life, his libido, was abnormal. Curiously explosive in their appearance and manifestations were his sexual impulses. They "beset him on occasions which were sometimes inconvenient, and a peculiarity about them was that they subsided with equal suddenness if not immediately gratified, or if meanwhile something occurred to discourage his attention. All women were to him 'filles de joie.' Sexual rather than social attractions in women appealed to him." He was never in love, never possessed of permanent affection or tenderness for any woman. This explosive periodicity of the sexual life, "with a tendency to compression of it to the merely physical," is another mark of some pituitary-centered personalities.
Two other phenomena that persisted throughout his life throw light upon his endocrine constitution. One was trouble with his bladder which he told Antommarchi, another physician, bothered him as long as he could remember. Irritability of the bladder was so pronounced that he could not sleep for more than a few hours at a time. After battles, the trouble became worse so that it interfered with his riding. Constitutional difficulties in urination have been connected definitely with the function of the pituitary. The other pituitary disturbances which tinctured his life were certain "brain storms," attacks of vomiting followed by "stupor verging on unconsciousness" brought on by outbursts of temper, physical overexertion, mental strain, or sexual excitement. It has been shown that such epileptic tendencies are present in subjects of pituitary disease, particularly those with pituitary instability. In Napoleon's case the brain attacks may have been crises of pituitary insufficiency in a hyper-pituitary type. This supposition is borne out by the headache which followed them, the headache of an oversecreting pituitary compensating for a defect in its formation. During his prime, his intellect was mathematical, logical, and rational, and remarkable for a prodigious memory. Such an intellect is the product of an extraordinary ante-pituitary. That he never permitted feeling to interfere with the dictates of his judgment, a quality which rendered him the most unscrupulous careerist of history, must be put down to an insufficiency of the post-pituitary. What post-pituitary does to the brain cells and the organism as a whole to render them susceptible to sympathy and suggestion, the social sublimations of the maternal instinct, with its offsprings of religion and art, we have seen. Napoleon lacked a chemical trace of the religious instinct, his sympathy was nil, and his conquests were made possible only because he was blind to the suffering and misery his greed for glory and dominion generated. Post-pituitary insufficients of this type, patent or concealed, gradually become corpulent as they grow older. The increasing corpulency of Napoleon was commented upon by all observers.
A student of his make-up, and acquainted with present developments concerning the internal secretions, given an opportunity to observe him as we have when he was alive, and at the height of his success, would have had every reason for classing him a pituitary-centered, ante-pituitary superior, post-pituitary inferior, with an instability of both that would lead to his final degeneration. Besides, his insatiable energy indicated an excellent thyroid, his pugnacity, animality and genius for practical affairs a superb adrenal. Given the kind of pituitary he possessed, with its great intellectual potential energy and the relation between the two parts which would further the objects of an intellectual machine, plus a remarkable thyroid and adrenal, plus the military education Napoleon had, and the character of the Revolution into which he was plunged, and we have the conditions out of which his career emerged as inevitable.