The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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Among the individuals whose personality is dominated by their sex
glands the physiognomy, physique and life reactions are so distinctive
that no better examples exist of our main thesis: that the whole life
of man is controlled primarily by his internal secretions. These
gonado-centric types are not all necessarily sex gland deficient, as
the term eunuchoid implies. They may be rather gonad unstable with a
corresponding instability of the entire endocrine system.
About the face of the eunuchoid the striking feature is the
incomplete, irregular, or absent hair development. Below thirty it is
chubby and ruddy, and rather childish in its texture; after thirty,
there is an effect of premature senility: the skin is yellowish,
leathery, and wrinkled as the faces of old women are wrinkled: the
upper lip is traversed by vertical wrinkles, and wrinkles come around
corners of the mouth. The expression is juvenile, effeminate or
plaintive.
Invariably the voice is higher pitched than the usual masculine tones.
It may be gentle and subdued, like a genteel female's, or strident and
rasping. Occasionally it is a pleasant high tenor. The Adam's apple,
poetic popular name for the thyroid cartilage, is never prominent,
because it is not ossified, as it should be in the normal male.
Tall and slender, or generally undersized, the muscles are soft
and flabby as a woman's. The hands and feet are small and gracile
typically. Viewed in profile, the lines of the body are feminine. The
breasts may reach almost the size of the female's and there may be a
well-marked area of pigmentation around the nipple. The hair growth
under the shoulders and on the lower abdomen tends to be scanty and to
approximate the opposite sex in quality and distribution, as do the
reproductive organs themselves.
These traits of physiognomy and physique indicate functional
hermaphroditism in the underlying feminoid constitution. The feminoid
constitution appears again in the supposedly masculine. The feminoid
constitution should not be confused with the infantiloid constitution.
The former, the gonado-centric personality, is a digression of growth,
a deviated evolution of the individual because of the conflicting
forces, some masculine and some feminine, in his make-up. The
infantiloid constitution is one of arrested development, and may
center around the arrested function in childhood or adolescence of
any one or a number of endocrine glands. Yet the two may resemble one
another pretty closely, at times. A cretin imitates the extreme grade
of infantiloid constitution. The infantiloid is a sort of enlarged and
lengthened child. The feminoid is ostensibly a man, with a good deal
of woman in him. The infantiloid is a quite general type, but of
course when typical is a freak, recognized and treated as such. How
far the eunuchoid may deviate from the normal is suggested by the
following description of one.
"Face rounded, moon-like, chubby, devoid of hair. Eyes puffed. Lips
protruding and fleshy. Cheeks round and thick. Nose little developed.
Skin thick and of clear color. Disproportion between the size of head
and body. Hair of scalp fine. Brows and lashes scarce, trunk elongated
and cylindrical. Limbs thick and plump, tapering from the root to the
extremities. Good fat layers over the entire body. Reproductive organs
those of a little boy. Infantile mental state: light-heartedness,
naivete, timidity, easily evoked tears and laughter, promptly aroused
but fugitive wrath: excessive tenderness, but unreasonable dislikes."
An almost wholly mental infantiloid state or one purely physical
may occur. Certain rather large Tom Thumbs belong to the group. In
everyday life we see doll creatures, overgrown children, on every
hand. Mental measurements of any large group of population reveal a
remarkable percentage of it as below the mental age of 12. Juvenile
traits and juvenile mind, separate or combined, should always suggest
the possibility of the infantiloid constitution of one type of
thymocentric also.
The eunuchoid or feminoid personality is also found often among
artists. One must carefully distinguish the two because the ensemble
of characteristics of the one may easily stimulate the other. Yet
fundamentally they are as far apart as the poles. The infantiloid
type never rises above the subnormal, which is its habitat, while the
feminoid type (or masculinoid, in woman) often produces an abnormal
personality which rises above the normal. The infantiloids become the
slaves and the weaklings of society, the Mark Tapleys, and the Tom
Pinches, while the eunuchoids have created splendid literature and
immortal music.
The life reactions, and especially the sex reactions of the
gonado-centric, are as complex and difficult as those of the
thymo-centric. Straightforward homosexuality and the eunuchoid
constitution have always been intimate. The homosexuality of the
thymo-centric is more subtle and disguised, often buried under the
stronger masculine component of the personality.
Homosexuality as a cult has appeared correlated with the production of
the functional hermaphrodite by artificially creating the eunuchoid
type of constitution. Among the Aztecs, homosexuals were produced
in quantity for religious purposes by a deliberate fostering of the
eunuchoid constitution. They called them the Mujerados. Their method
consisted in making a healthy man ride horseback constantly, until an
irritable weakness of the reproductive organs ensued, and a paralytic
impotence followed. The exhausted testes would then atrophy, and the
voice ring falsetto, muscular tone and energy diminish, inclinations
and habits become feminine. The Mujerado lost his position in society
as a man, assumed female clothing, manners and customs, and to all
intents and purposes was treated as a woman. Their large breasts were
said to be capable of lactation. Their only reward was the high honor
paid them as religious consecrates.
Among the Phoenicians there was a similar sect, devoted to the worship
of Astarte. Known as the Galli, they were men who had transformed
themselves into the closest possible resemblance to women. At all
times they were prepared to engage with members of either sex in
sexual relations of the most depraved kind. They lived in idleness as
prostitutes, cultivating and extending their skill in sex perversions
as specialists. Their initiation into their professional careers was
a part of a religious ritual. During the revels of great festivals,
apprentices to the trade, wrought up by certain traditional songs and
music, would be hypnotised into a frenzy, run amuck, throw off every
garment, and, snatching up swords, deliberately placed in convenient
spots, castrate themselves at one blow. In a wilder hysteria,
screaming loudly, the self-made eunuchs would then run through the
streets holding the severed organs high above their heads. At last,
faint through loss of blood, they brought their madness to its climax
by hurling the organs in their hands into the nearest houses, so
forcing the owners to take them in, and provide them with female
wearing apparel, and the other feminine accoutrements of war.
Henceforth, this manner of dress was not to be changed. The physical
changes followed. The hair of the face was lost, the breasts enlarged,
the voice became high-pitched, and the other type-characters of the
eunuchoid complex appeared.
These constitutions thus may be either congenital or acquired.
Individuals apparently normal during childhood and adolescence may
be transformed. Injuries to the reproductive glands, sometimes the
slightest bruises, may lead to atrophy, and a change of personality
follows in less than six weeks. Mumps may achieve the same results
because of the inflammation of the gonads that may accompany or follow
it.
Whole family and races may show some of the signs of the eunuchoid
constitution for generations. According to Darwin (Descent of Man)
"the development of the beard and the hairiness of the body differ
remarkably in the men of distinct races, and even in different tribes,
and families of the same race. On the European-Asiatic continent,
beards prevail, until we pass beyond India, although with the
natives of Ceylon they are often absent.... Eastward of India beards
disappear, as with the Siamese, Kalmuks, Malays, Chinese, and
Japanese. Throughout the great American continent the men may be said
to be beardless: but in almost all tribes a few short hairs are apt to
appear on the face, especially in old age...." Hair being an adrenal
cortex trait, it is to be inferred that hairless families and races
are more eunuchoid, and possess less of the adrenal cortex secretion
than the more hairy.
Whatever the exceptions--and there have been eunuch generals in
history--Marces, Chancellor of Justinian, who beat the Goths at
Nocera, and Ali the Gallant who commanded the Turkish Army after the
invasion of Hungary in 1856--the eunuchoid generally runs to type in
his mentality and his sexuality. He is an introvert, his personality
is shut in, he isolates himself from the world.
The lower eunuchoids exhibit a curiously child-like personality.
Naively confiding, communicating to all comers all their joys and
sorrows, they ask diffidently for confirmation of their statements,
and they pass quickly from tears to laughter. About sexual matters
they are extremely timid. A moral innocence pervades their speech and
conduct. Usually they have no true conception of crimes of jealousy
or passion. The occupations they go in for are those without
responsibility away from crowds or observation, such as ship cooks,
stewards, and so on. They marry to find a home, without the object of
establishing sexual relations. When they are asked whether they think
their wives will be pleased to look at the matter in the same light,
and be contented to live with a man upon such conditions, they are
puzzled or perplexed, as if they had never thought seriously about
the matter before. Their simplicity has even extended to proposing to
their wives to seek gratification from some other man. Naturally, such
an arrangement often proves unsatisfactory, and desertion follows.
Concerning the children sometimes the offspring of these unions,
scepticism as to the identity of the father is decidedly permissible.
Still in some cases the best of evidence exists that fertility occurs.
The vitality of the children then is subnormal and the mortality
rate high. The eunuchoid tendency is transmitted. Variations and
transitions of every kind are found among the undersexed eunuchoid
personalities, depending upon the quality and degree of the secretions
lacking.
When there is an excess of these sex secretions, a turbulent,
tempestuous, sexually sensitive temperament, that may go on to
satyriasis or nymphomania, is created. It has been shown that doves
can be rendered overfeminine in their behaviour and characteristics
by injections of ovarian material. Oversexed types of personality
therefore may exist as well as undersexed.
COMBINATIONS AND PERMUTATIONS
The types of personality sketched--the thyrocentric, the
pituitocentric, the adrenocentric, the thymocentric, the
gonadocentric--are really prototypes, the great kingdoms of
personality, to which individuals can be assigned, by hall marks which
facilitate their classification. They may also be described as the
pure endocrine types, which include a minority of a population. But
the majority consist of dominant mixtures, hyphenates, groups which
are the species and varieties of the greater classes. Combinations and
variations of control among the adrenals and thyroid, pituitary or
thymus, and so on, occur, with effects that are sometimes additive,
reinforcing a particular trait of the person, and at others
conflicting, and neutralizing. Quantitative variations of the same
secretion may occur periodically in the same individual, which
explains the multiplicity and complexity, the inconsistency and
contradictions of conduct in a man or woman at the different episodes
and crises of life, to a certain extent.
There should be a stable balance between the various endocrines, the
stability expressing itself in what we are pleased to call the normal.
There should also be a balance between the antagonistic elements in
the same gland; for instance, the pituitary. The pituitary, built
of two distinct portions, the anterior and the posterior, is in
equilibrium when the two are nicely adjusted. But the accidents and
vicissitudes of life (pregnancy for example) will upset the balance.
And so there will result changes of physique, conduct and character.
Like possibilities apply to all the other glands of internal
secretion. In our ability to exercise a control over these
disturbances of balance, to be developed in the future, lies one
of the great hopes for a chemical perfectability of human life and
nature.
NATURE'S EXPERIMENTS VS. MAN'S
The kinds of personality described, as prototypes and variants and the
fundamental facts supporting the view that they are the reaction types
of the human beings we meet in everyday life, represent simply a
beginning of the work to be done. Putting into our hands a new
powerful searchlight that penetrates the interiors of body and soul, a
fresh attitude toward the complicated problems of Man in society grows
imminent. The normal and the abnormal become illuminated with an
effect as if our retinas were suddenly to get sensitive to the
ultraviolet rays to which we are now blind. An apparatus is put in our
hands which shows us not only a static condition at a given moment,
but the whole life process of an individual, normal or abnormal, his
past and his future.
Upon that fetich of the biologists, the struggle for existence, the
struggle for survival, the struggle for possessions and satisfactions,
for happiness, victory and virility, in short, for success, as success
is measured by the biologists, a searching spectroscope can play, with
a yield for our understanding and control of life, that will stand
comparison with the astronomer's analysis of the stars. Toward the
process of adjustment and adaptation, of the environment to the
individual, as well as of the individual to the environment, attitudes
will change from _hopeless acquiescence in the inevitable to a
complete self-determination of the self and its surroundings._ The
adventures of the personality, strung along as the episodes of his
career, his friendships and sex reactions, his mishaps and diseases,
and the final fate or fortune that overtakes him, be he normal,
subnormal, supernormal, or abnormal, begin to become comprehensible,
and hence controllable.
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.
That it was his pituitary which first failed him, rather than the
thyroid or adrenal, which might have, is demonstrated by a number of
considerations. Before he made himself Emperor, it was noticed that he
was becoming fat, a pituitary symptom. A comparison of portraits at
different stages of his rise and fall shows an increasing abdominal
paunch, and a laying down of fat in the pituitary areas, around the
hips, the legs and so on. The beginning of weakness in judgment that
he was to exhibit soon in the invasion of Russia manifested itself at
the same time. His keen calculating ability attained the peak of its
curve at Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland. Thereafter, the descent
begins. A rash, grandiose, speculative quality enters his projects,
and divorces the elaborate coordination of means and end from his
plans. That his thyroid energy capacity did not fail him is indicated
by the fact that at St. Albans he would ride for three hours at the
end of the day to tire himself sufficiently for sleep. That his
adrenals were not affected is indicated by the brutality which
remained characteristic to the end of his life.
The findings after death confirm the view of him as an unstable
pituitocentric who succumbed to pituitary insufficiency toward the
latter half of his life. We possess the account of the postmortem by
Dr. Henry, who performed it. "The whole surface of the body was deeply
covered with fat. Over the sternum, where generally the bone is very
superficial, the fat was upwards of an inch deep, and an inch and a
half or two inches on the abdomen. There was scarcely any hair on the
body, and that of the head was thin, fine and silky. The whole genital
system (very small) seemed to exhibit a physical cause for the absence
of sexual desire, and the chastity which had been stated to have
characterized the deceased (during his stay at St. Helena). The skin
was noticed to be very white and delicate as were the hands and arms.
Indeed the whole body was slender and effeminate. The pubis much
resembled the Mons Veneris in women. The muscles of the chest were
small, the shoulders were narrow and the hips wide." In other words,
the typical feminization of the body which accompanies pituitary
insufficiency was found. He died of a cancer of the stomach. But
before his death there were noted the mental transformations that
succeed deficiency of his central endocrine. Apathy, indolence,
fatigability, and frilosity were what impressed his associates at St.
Helena. The deterioration of his mentality was also exemplified in his
literary diversions, the "Siege of Troy" and the "Essay on Suicide."
The puerility of these productions, as well as of his conduct, a
sulking before his captors, and the decline of his physical energy,
once a bottomless well, all point to the same conclusion.
The rise and fall of Napoleon followed the rise and fall of his
pituitary gland. No better illustration exists of the fundamental
determination of a personality and its career by an endocrine,
aside from other factors of education, environment, accident and
opportunity. Without the sort of endocrine equipment he was born with,
however, none of the other factors would have found the material to
work upon. Born, say, with more of a posterior pituitary than he had,
which would have rendered him more sensitive to the sufferings of his
fellow-creatures, if nothing else, and the forces of the Revolution
probably would have swamped him from the very first moment of his
emergence at Toulon, when the whiff of grape-shot, symptom of an
inexorable, merciless intellect and will, started him upon the road
that led to the Napoleonic Era. Destiny is always ironic. For the
deficiency of the internal secretions which made him eligible for
glory was responsible as well as for his downfall.