The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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EPILEPSY AND MIGRAINE IN GENIUS
In the annals of genius, there occur a number of instances of those
who suffered from attacks that have been diagnosed epilepsy
or migraine. Because their ailment was associated with their
extraordinary ability, they attracted an attention that concerned
itself not at all with the circumstance that genius has also been
liable to measles, scarlet fever, and so on. Epilepsy and migraine
certainly occur in people of no supernormal gifts, and often in
degenerates and subnormals. Yet the fact remains that these affections
of the nervous system, so terrible to feel and to behold, have
afflicted the finest brains of the race.
About forty years ago the idea established itself that epilepsy,
exhibiting itself in one form or another as "fits," and migraine, the
severe periodic sick headache, were interconvertible manifestations of
the same underlying morbid process in the brain. Nothing in the way
of a concrete cause, attackable on the material side, was elicited by
this generalization. Then the investigations of the pituitary in the
last decade produced evidence of epilepsy-like and migraine-like
symptoms in sufferers from tumors or other enlargements of it.
Reasoning back, cases of epilepsy and migraine began to be examined
for evidences of involvement of the pituitary in their troubles.
These accumulated rapidly. The physiognomy and physique of the
pituito-centric were discovered in them. The phenomena noted in
Napoleon's case were often present: lowering of the pulse, chilliness,
and an increased irritability of the bladder. In women the attack
often coincides with the menstrual period, a typical time of endocrine
unbalance. Finally X-ray examinations of the sella turcica, the bony
lodging of the pituitary, clinched the matter: it often appeared
small, or enlarged, with erosions of the bone, signifying a desperate
attempt of the gland to grow, and meet the needs of the organism. The
complex of appearances called migraine now becomes understandable.
There are a number of factors, such as fatigue, intense cold, or high
sugar food like chocolate, which will cause an engorgement of the
gland with blood and swelling of it. But they do not concern us now.
Intense mental occupation, concentration as the popular term has it,
acts as a patent excitor of the attack.
Brain work drives more blood into the brain and the gland. Besides,
mental activity is accompanied by increased function of the
ante-pituitary, if intellectual, or of the post-pituitary if
emotional. Brain work then causes a temporary enlargement of the
gland. If, now, the bone container of the endocrine is too small to
permit of much swelling, the bone will be pressed against or even worn
into. This means headache, severe, easily going on to the kind known
as sick-headache. The nerves which move the eyes in various directions
lie next to the pituitary. If, in its expansion, it moves sufficiently
outward, it may press upon, irritate them or paralyze, and so evolve
various eye disturbances in association with the headache. No one can
overrate this conception of migraine, for a number of men of genius
have suffered from sick-headache and eye symptoms.
As for epilepsy, the problem is more complex. One has to rule out
first those who have organic destructive disease of the brain. But
they are out of our field: genius predicates at least an intact brain.
Of the others a number may be interpreted upon an endocrine basis. At
least they will, in their physiognomy, physique, mentality, conduct
and character, document the glandular constellation under which they
live, and a proper understanding of which is necessary for them to be
helped. One frequently seen is the thymo-centric, with small enclosed
sella turcica. The latter fact explains the occurrence of the
epilepsy. Periodic variations in the secretory tides of the other
endocrines, the ovaries, the thyroid, and so on, may determine the
onset of the attack of "fits." The point is that when epilepsy plays a
constant part in the life history of a man of genius, we are justified
in assuming a disturbed balance among his hormones, and so a reasoned
picture perhaps of the foundations for the erratic in his behaviour or
his productions.
THE NEURASTHENIC GENIUS
The fin de siecle intelligentsia of the nineteenth century were quite
stirred up by a publication of Max Nordau on "Degeneration," in which
a number of revered artists and intelligents were held up to public
scorn as degenerates and neurasthenics. So wrought up were they, in
fact, that Bernard Shaw was moved to compose a defense entitled "The
Sanity of Art." In spite of the Great Vegetarian's dialectics, it
remains to be explained why a certain species of creative ability has
been combined with the fatigability, variability and general wretched
irritability of every organ and tissue in the body which taught them
that they were sensitive souls imprisoned in the flesh. Going from
doctor to doctor as from pillar to post, from this medical creed to
that hygienic cult, lucky to escape the worst, often landing upon the
bosom of New Thought for succor. We have noted in previous chapters
the relation of neurasthenia to the glands of internal secretion
in general, and to adrenal insufficiency in particular. A closer
examination of neurasthenic genius will show it to consist essentially
of a pituitocentric in whom for one reason or another, congenital (the
persistence of the thymus) or acquired (shocks, accidents, diseases)
there has been failure of the adrenals, thyroid or the interstitial
cells, about in the order of their occurrence.
THE CASE OF NIETZSCHE
Friedrich Nietzsche is about as good a case as there is on record of a
genius blasted by migraine. The originality and force of his mind, as
well as the articulate music of an imaginative poet, places Nietzsche
among the philosophic elect of the race. Showing that he was an
unstable pituitary-centered of a certain type will throw light upon
his malady, as well as upon his life and work.
In a set of volumes, entitled Biographic Clinics, Dr. George M. Gould
of Philadelphia contended that the ill health of a number of men and
women of genius of the nineteenth century was due to unconnected eye
troubles. In attempting to bolster up his thesis he has collected
biographic material useful to the student of personality. He never
appears to have asked himself what was behind the eye trouble. The
evidence relating to Nietzsche's endocrine personality is derived from
some of the data he collected, as well as from the two volume life of
the philosopher written by his sister, and the other biographies of
him extant.
To reconstruct the endocrine formula or equation of Nietzsche
inductively, one should analyze first the information available
concerning his parents and relatives. His grandfather was a
conservative bourgeois of a superior type, who was the author of
treatises designed to narcotize the forces of rebellion of his time.
What he was like physically, no epitaph declares. His father was a
clergyman. A description of him reads ... "tall and slender, with a
noble and poetic personality, and a peculiar talent for music ...
short-sighted." That ranks him at once as a pituito-centric.
The mother was dark and had a fiery temper and came of a family
distinguished for the powerfully built anatomy of its members. In
the heredity of Nietzsche, the father appears therefore to supply
a pituitary predominating element, the mother an adrenal-pituitary
predominating element.
Nietzsche himself worked strenuously at the intellectual life (after
20, when he probably stopped growing, and the brain tonic action of
the ante-pituitary could manifest itself). Early distinction rewarded
him with a professorship in philology at 24. One of Prussia's wars
of conquest entangled him, and presented him with diphtheria. A
friendship with Richard Wagner marked the turning point of his life,
and the point of departure for his works on the most fundamental
values of human life. Meanwhile, attacks of sick-headache of varying
degrees of severity made him miserable periodically--they came about
every two weeks and lasted two to three days--and left him wretched
and exhausted. At last, at 44, a species of stroke terminated his
sufferings, causing him to lose his speech and memory, and thenceforth
there was progressive deterioration, physical and spiritual, with
repeated attacks.
In the sister's biography there are several good photographs and
reproductions of sculptures of Nietzsche at different ages. An
examination of the frontispiece picture, which shows him in profile
(profile views are the best for physiognomy), as well as of the bust
of Nietzsche by Donndorf, exhibit the most striking traits of the
head. To the student of internal secretions, the most prominent
feature of the face, emphasized by both the camera and the artist,
is the remarkable prominence of the supra-orbital arches, the bony
protuberances from which the eyebrows spring. This is a definite
pituitary character. The eyebrows themselves are luxurious and slope
to meet, the bony development of the face as a whole is sharp and
clean-cut, the skull tends to be long and narrow and the chin is
square. All these point to a pituitary-centered personality. It is to
be regretted that we have no picture or record of Nietzsche caught
smiling, which would have preserved the state of his teeth for us. At
any rate, considered as checks to my interpretation, his physiognomy
and physique, the nature of his genius and the attacks which finally
ruined his life, all fit into the conception of him as one whose life
centered, like Napoleon's, around what was happening in his sella
turcica.
The attacks of sick-headache, diagnosable symptomatically as
migraine, were so devastating that in 1883, after the printing of his
masterpiece, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," he wrote "My life has been
a complete failure." Extracts from his letters, collected by Gould,
provide some idea of his suffering. In 1888, just before his stroke,
he said, "I have in my eyes a dynamometer of my entire condition."
The history of Nietzsche's eye trouble makes it probable that not
simply a defect in his eyes themselves, but a deeper condition behind
them was responsible. Up to the age of 15 he was a model scholar.
Essential eye defects of refraction should make themselves felt during
childhood. Then, with adolescence, he changed. Adolescence is one
of the red-letter epochs for the pituitary, when its growth and
enlargement precedes and stimulates the ripening of the sex cells
in the reproductive organs. Until adolescence ended and physical
development ceased, his intellectual interests were nil, and he was
particularly backward in mathematics. Colds and coughs, and recurring
pains in the head and eyes bothered him (colds and coughs are frequent
in those whose pituitary expansion is limited by the bony sella
turcica to any extent). After his puberty, migraine definitely became
his demon companion. Following the diphtheria in the army (which
must have damaged his adrenals), the attacks grew much worse, and
complaints about them more bitter because the pituitary now, in
addition to its own burden, had to compensate for the insufficient
adrenals. So "his frequent illness made him more and more a subject of
treatment and commiseration.... If only my eyes would hold out ...
it seems to me at the age of 30 as if I had lived 60 years ... very
frequent sufferings of stomach, head and eyes ... acidity oppresses
me, and everything except the tenderest food becomes acid.... I cannot
doubt that I am the victim of a serious cerebral disease, and that
stomach and eyes suffer only from this central cause ... half-dead
with pain and exhaustion." In December 1888, he fell, had to be
helped home, lay silent for two days, then became loud, active and
unbalanced. The attack was preceded by the drinking of much water.
The specific quality of the Nietzsche genius also directs attention to
a pituitocentric, to a pituitocentric in whom both ante-pituitary and
post-pituitary are extraordinarily well-functioning, but are in a
state of unbalance in which the post-pituitary gets the upper hand.
Now, as we have seen, the post-pituitary makes for that instability
of association between the brain cells which must be at the bottom of
originality and creative thought, as well as of phobias, obsessions,
hysterias and hallucinations. Persons in whom the post-pituitary
predominates have a lively fancy and are liable to suffer from the
tricks of association. Nietzsche, as we have noted, was poor in
mathematics and in the calm cool proportioned forward march of
scientific thought in general. His most brilliant ideas came to him in
flashes and gleams. That is why so much of his work has come down to
us in the form of aphorisms and paragraphs. He was, essentially, a
poet among the metaphysicians, which again favors the conception of
him as a pituitary-centered with a dominant post-pituitary. Yet his
incisive critical faculty, as well as his love of music, also document
the supernormal ante-pituitary.
To sum up, the physique and physiognomy of Nietzsche, his migraine
attacks and the later fate which overtook him, his likes and
dislikes, his tastes, abilities and accomplishments followed from his
composition as one pituitary-centered, with post-pituitary domination,
a superior thyroid, and inferior adrenals.
DARWIN AS A NEURASTHENIC GENIUS
Charles Darwin, as the author of the "Origin of Species" and the
greatest revolutionist of the nineteenth century, has naturally had
a great deal of attention paid to his life and personality. Yet not
until the publication of his Autobiography and his son's Reminiscences
was it generally known that he suffered from chronic ill health for
most of his adult life. Dr. W.A. Johnston, in an article in the
_American Anthropologist_, 1901, has marshalled a number of available
facts, to sustain his thesis that Darwin was a victim of neurasthenia.
Now neurasthenia, it is now accepted, is simply a waste-basket word,
corresponding to the class miscellaneous in a classification of any
group of real objects. And, as has been emphasized in preceding
chapters, most neurasthenia rises upon a disturbed endocrine
foundation, most often, an insufficiency of the adrenals. That is, a
defect in the chain of co-operation, balance and compensation among
the internal secretions is the basis for the weakness of the nervous
system the term neurasthenia is supposed to explain, actually only
names. Darwin's case was pretty certainly that.
There can be no doubt that Darwin had an abnormal fatigability, a lack
of stamina and endurance in mental as well as physical application
which plagued him from the late twenties to the sixties. As a child,
he was strong and healthy, fond of outdoors, and though underrated by
his teachers, noted to be possessed of intense curiosity, especially
concerning natural objects. At school he was a fleet runner and
cultivated a habit of long walks. Then he was surely no neurasthenic.
Three years which, he himself afterwards said, were worse than wasted,
at Cambridge, were filled with shooting, riding and hunting. His good
health lasted until the time he probably stopped growing at 21 or 22.
Thereafter his troubles began.
What was Darwin, so far as his endocrine composition was concerned?
In the first place his father was a variety of pituitocentric, of the
post-pituitary inferior type, six feet two inches tall, exceedingly
corpulent, and, in the eyes of his son, the sharpest of observers and
the most sympathetic of men. He wished to make a physician out of his
son in order to carry on the medical tradition of the family: Erasmus
Darwin was a physician before him. His son, however, showed no
inclination for so learned and confining a profession and had to
be reproached by his father in these immortal words: "You care for
nothing but shooting dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a
disgrace to yourself and all your family."
Cambridge came after Edinburgh, as he was rushed from medicine into
the clergy. But in vain. A friendship struck up with a naturalist,
Henslow, settled his career for him. Henslow heard of a trip of
general exploration the ship _Beagle_ was to take and recommended
Darwin as naturalist. The captain at first would not hear of the
proposal because of Darwin's nose, a typical pituitary proboscis. But
his prejudices were overcome, and Darwin sailed.
It was upon this voyage that Darwin made himself the greatest
naturalist of all time, and at the same time infected himself with
the virus of neurasthenia. At Plymouth, while waiting for the ship to
sail, he complained of palpitation and pain about the heart, probably
due to a transient hyperthyroidism, brought on by excitement. During
the voyage, which lasted five years, he was afflicted often by
sea-sickness. A ship-mate relates that after spending an hour with the
microscope he would say "Old Fellow, I must take the horizontal for
it" and lie down. He would stretch out on one side of the table, then
resume his labors for a while when he again had to lie down. Already
fatigability had to be fed with rest. A serious illness that Darwin
claimed affected every secretion of his body acted probably as the
exhausting drain upon his adrenal potential.
The return to England was the date of onset for a record of continuous
illness, aggravated by his marriage, apparently, for his misery
increased progressively after it. So much so that he was forced to
leave London altogether so as to avoid the strain of social life, even
that of meeting his scientific friends or attending scientific society
meetings fatiguing him to exhaustion. After such occasions there would
be attacks of violent shivering, with vomiting and giddiness. It was
necessary for him to impose upon himself an absolute regime of daily
routine. Any interference with it upset him completely, and made it
impossible for him to do any work. Early morning was the only time for
physical as we; as mental exertion. Evening found him thoroughly used
up, with every move an effort. Insomnia made him its prey. A curious
sensitiveness to heat and cold distressed him. In 1859, when the
"Origin of Species" appeared, he wrote to a friend that his health had
quite failed, and that indigestion, headaches, with a looming hopeless
breakdown of body and mind made his life a burden and a curse. The
twenty years of research he devoted to the problems of evolution were
one long torture. For sixteen more years, during which he worked upon
and produced immortal classics of biology, he was the most wretched
and unhappy sufferer from neurasthenia. His life was a continuous
alternation of small doses of work and large doses of rest. So he
was enabled to publish twenty-three volumes of original writing and
fifty-one scientific papers. Living a sort of quasi-sanitarium life,
with the rules and regulations of one undergoing a rest cure for
thirty-six years, he thus accomplished infinitely more than the
millions who have led the strenuous life. That he thus survived, as a
genius, among the perils of an intellectual nature in an environment
for which his adrenals sentenced him to destruction, must be put down
in large measure to the ministrations and good sense of wife and
children who supplied him with the endocrine energy he lacked. All
these details I have given in the attempt to analyze the internal
secretion constitution of this great man of genius, to establish that
he really suffered from inadequate function of his adrenal glands, for
the symptoms of chronic though benign adrenal insufficiency coincide
in their mass effect with the story of his life. He was not a good
animal, as Herbert Spencer declared was a first sine qua non of the
successful life. He was a poor animal, the poorest of animals, because
he possessed poor adrenals. What saved him was his congenitally
superior pituitary (the nidus of genius) and the overacting thyroid,
which combined to compensate to some extent for his fundamental lack.
According to his son he rose early because he could not lie in bed,
and he would have liked to get up earlier than he did.
What other hints have we that in spite of his fatigue disease he was
a pituitocentric? The record of his physique and physiognomy,
documentary and that left in portraits and photographs. He was tall
and thin and his frame was naturally strong and large. Face was ruddy,
and his grey eyes looked out from under deep overhanging brows and
bushy eyebrows. The ears were large and prominent, the hair straight,
the nose broad and well developed. All these are distinctive pituitary
traits. The photograph of him taken by Maull and Fox in 1854 shows his
chin to be the square firm kind that goes with the ante-pituitary type
physique. (This photo is the frontispiece of the collection of essays
entitled "Darwinism and Modern Science," edited by A.C. Seward and
published in 1909). Charles Darwin, we may say, then, lived the
life of one with a hyperfunctioning pituitary, the anterior portion
dominating the posterior, a thyroid excess, and an adrenal much
deficient, the combination settling the fate of a grand intellect
in an invalid. It is interesting to note that an extant portrait
of Erasmus Darwin, Darwin's distinguished grandfather, shows a
pituitocentric, but with a rounder head and a fatter face, which point
to a predominance of the post-pituitary over the ante-pituitary.
Correspondingly, he was more speculative and poetic intellectually
than his grandson, and more irascible and imperious in his moods.
After 1872, when Charles Darwin was sixty-three years old, a marked
change for the better occurred in his health. For the last ten years
of his life the condition of his health was a cause of satisfaction
and hope to his family. "He was able to work more steadily with less
fatigue and distress afterwards." This is probably to be explained as
following the gonadopause hi him--the cessation of activity of the
interstitial cells. After this event, the adrenals in the male nearly
always function more efficiently, and well being is improved even
though the blood pressure often rises coincidently. In the relative
vigor of that decade we have another bit of evidence that the adrenals
had much to say over Darwin's life.
EPILEPTIC GENIUS
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.