He had a fever when he was in Spain
And, when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake: 'tis true, this god did shake
His coward lips did from their color fly;
And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world,
Did lose his lustre: I did hear him groan.
—Julius Caesar.
Epilepsy, the "falling sickness" or "fits," is generally associated with a deterioration or degeneration of mentality, and an inferior personality is frequently an ingredient. Progressively increasing data accumulate to incriminate more and more a disturbance of the endocrine balance, on the side of multiple deficiencies, as the basic mechanism at the bottom of a good many of them. Concurrent studies reveal that abnormalities of the thyroid, the parathyroids, the ovaries and testes, and even the thymus exist behind the attack. Investigation of the content of the consciousness of the different kinds of epilepsies from this point of view will doubtless bring to light some interesting information. There is much to be done for the epileptic with this new method of approach.
Epilepsy, just the same, may occur in men gifted with the sort of transcendent ability called genius. Mohammed, Lord Byron, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, to name a few cases, are famous instances. The point to be settled is whether epileptic genius, that is epilepsy with superior ability, occurs most often in pituitocentrics, the epilepsy being symptomatic of a pituitary struggling against barriers, tugging against bonds. As mentioned, in such cases epilepsy appears as the twin brother of migraine in genius. Should that be established, we should have more evidence for the pituitary dominance of most specimens of intellectual power. As a case in point let us take the most famous of the epileptic geniuses—Julius Caesar, "When the fit was on I marked how he did shake; tis true, this god did shake."
According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar was of slender build, fair-complexioned, pale, emaciated, of a delicate constitution (reminding us of Darwin), subject to severe headache and violent attacks of epilepsy. In view of the work of Cushing, the concurrence of "severe headache and violent attacks of epilepsy" is sharply suggestive of a pituitary origin for both. In his seventeenth year he was already engaged to be married, which proves his precocity. An overactive, erratic pituitary could here also be held responsible. Soon after he was proscribed by the dictator Sulla, and the first of a series of epileptic convulsions is recorded. Shock tries the pituitary, as well as the adrenals.
His sexual libido was of the quality that stimulated his soldiers to sing celebrations of his exploits. The first woman he was engaged to be jilted. Cornelia, his first wife, he divorced on the ground that "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." Matrimony committed twice thereafter landing him in the divorce court, he devoted himself to liaisons, one with Cleopatra. This sexual hyperactivity was probably another pituitary trait.
The compound of intellectual and practical ability he realized was of the rarest. It meant a most delicate balance between his ante-pituitary, post-pituitary, adrenals and thyroid. He was an orator, politician, historian, conqueror, and statesman. That his thyroid functioned well can be deduced from a career which involved more than three hundred personal triumphs as recognition from his native city. On horseback, riding without using his hands, he would often dictate to two or three secretaries at once. The masculine love of glory and ambition, expression of a well-working ante-pituitary, was combined with the effeminate echoes of an equally well-evolved post-pituitary. No prima donna was more concerned with the care of her skin, complexion and hair than he. The analogy extends even to superfluous hair which he had removed, not by the modern electrolysis, but by depilation with forceps and main force. The attendants at his bath would polish his epidermis, for his satisfaction, until it resembled alabaster or marble.
Caesar was not the kind of great man that Darwin was, and only a rather muddled careerist because he had too much adrenal and post-pituitary. But he was pituitocentric of a certain type. We possess no authentic portraits or busts of him to go by. But the bust in the Museum of Naples, for which he probably sat (some, H.G. Wells among them, will not accept this), presents the sort of face that is often seen in pituitary epileptics, and the features and skull of a pituitocentric: long, large, well-modeled head eyebrows prominent, with tendency to meet, aquiline nose and strong chin.
In these three, Napoleon, Nietzsche and Caesar, we have male pituitocentrics, exhibiting diversities of life and tastes because of differences in the co-working endocrine glands in their makeup. We shall consider now a female pituitocentric who presents the strangest contrasts in physique, physiognomy, conduct and character, dependent upon a variation in the balance between the two portions of the pituitary.