The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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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.
THE LEGEND OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
All biographies consist of prevarications and all autobiographies
of fiction. That summing up of a mass of literature over which
industrious students have ruined their eyes, held good until after the
War, when things changed. Then Mr. Lytton Strachey, at one fell blow,
and with one magnificent masterpiece, hurdled the old idols and
established a new standard of deliberate accuracy in print. In his
"Eminent Victorians" he set the pace for the host of those who have
been stimulated by his good example, like Lady Margot Asquith.
Of the four Victorian respectable worthies Strachey has dissected as
ruthlessly as the anatomist a post-mortem, his portrait of Florence
Nightingale, the founder of the modern science and art of nursing, is
most interesting because it provides data of the utmost value to
the student of the endocrine basis of human personality. In the
conventional two-volume biography of this superwoman, she is pictured
as an intellectual saint, stepped from a stained glass window upon her
wonderful visit to a clay-smeared earth. The biographer, presenting
all the ins and outs of her body and soul as he has, makes her live
before us with a fresh vitality that is startling.
The species of life Florence Nightingale lived, involving as it did
struggle with a masculine world, and conquest of it, implies the
existence in her of certain masculine traits and marks, for the normal
feminine psyche is submissive rather than aggressive toward its
environment, human and otherwise. Belonging to a family in the highest
circles, it was upon the table d'hote of her destiny that she should
become a regulation debutante, careeristina, and successful wife and
mother. Instead, she chose to question the whole routine of the life
of her class, and in her diary she records her doubts and cravings,
and her revolt against what is assumed by her family and friends to be
the normal course of existence for her. The attitudes and questionings
in these passages, the religious feeling displayed, are distinctly
masculine. Most easily could the following, for instance, pass as
having been written by a man: "I desire for a considerable time only
to lead a life of obscurity and toil, for the purpose of allowing
whatever I may have received of God to ripen, and turning it some day
to the glory of His Name. Nowadays people are too much in a hurry
both to produce and consume themselves. It is only in retirement, in
silence, in meditation that are formed the _men_ who are called to
exercise an influence upon society." In a note-book she puts May 7,
1852, as the date upon which she was conscious of a call from God
to be a saviour. Now the vast majority of women who have remained
spinsters at 32, in spite of considerable personal attractions and
high natural ability, are visited by waves of emotional fervor for a
de-personalization of the self. But in the case of the subject, as
Strachey has so well shown, the call was pursued with a self-willed,
pitiless, unscrupulous determination, worthy of Satan himself upon the
most ferocious evil bent. In its pursuit indeed she became what her
latest biographer has called a "woman possessed by a Demon." All
necessary, not alone because if she had been meek and mild she would
have existed in futility, but because of the high percentage of the
masculine endocrines in her composition. It is most regrettable that
we have no statement of the findings of a gynecologic examination of
her. That she was almost consciously masculine may be inferred not
only from the way she bullied Lord Pannure and worked to death her
dearest friend with the angelic temper, Sidney Herbert, who was so
amiable that he could be driven by one who wrote: "I have done with
being amiable. It is the mother of all mischief." She could also
write, "I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an
excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and _other men_.
When a disaster happens, I act, and they make excuses."
Lytton Strachey has painted superbly all this in his essay. But for us
his most significant passage is the following: "When old age actually
came, something curious happened. Destiny, having waited patiently,
played a queer trick upon Miss Nightingale. The benevolence and public
spirit of that long life had only been equaled by its acerbity. Her
virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured forth her unstinted
usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And now the sacredness
of years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was not to die
as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her: she was to be
made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and complacency. The
change came gradually, but at last it was unmistakable."
"_There appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical mould._
The _thin, angular_ woman, with her haughty eye, and her acrid mouth,
had vanished, and in her place was the _rounded, bulky form_ of a _fat
old lady_, smiling all day long. Then something else became visible.
The brain which had been steeled at Scutari was, indeed,
literally growing soft. Senility--an ever more and more amiable
senility--descended."
We have here an absolutely typical pituitary history, with another
case of pituitocentric natural ability. What happens when pituitary
hyperfunction or superiority becomes underfunction or inferiority is
precisely as Strachey has described so cleverly of the "ministering
angel": the acrid, thin and keen degenerate every time into the
amiable, fat and dull. Just as Napoleon was transformed by the
mutations of his pituitary, so was the Saint with the Lamp. And in
both instances the contrasting modifications, from one extreme of
glandular function to the other, supply us with the clue to the secret
hand of their inner being and becoming, which worked upon the twists
and turns of circumstance about them as a sculptor upon clay.
The official biography by Sir Edward Cook contains three portraits,
representing three different stages, which bear out the pituitocentric
thesis of her personality and life history. One as she was at 25, and
pictured by Mrs. Gaskell: "She is tall; very straight and willowy in
figure; thick and shortish rich brown hair; very delicate complexion
... perfect teeth ... perfect grace and lovely appearance ... she is
so like a saint." The face is long and oval, of the post-pituitary
kind. Then gradually the ante-pituitary gained an ascendency in the
concert of her internal secretions, so coloring her life with its
masculine tints, and altering her face as well as her disposition. The
photograph of her taken when she was 38 shows a quadrangular outline,
and all the acridity that impressed Strachey. The last picture of her,
a water color drawing made in 1907, shows a round visaged old dame,
who might be the peasant grandmother of two dozen descendants. Little
patches of red over the cheek bones remind one of myxedema and
indicate that toward the very end of her life her thyroid failed her
as well as her pituitary. So that our biographer relates: "Then by
Royal Command, the Order of Merit was brought to South Street, and
there was a little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson, after
a short speech, stepped forward and handed the order of the insignia
to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly recognized
that some compliment was being paid her. 'Too kind--too kind!' she
murmured; and she was not ironical." In the days of pituitary and
thyroid hyperfunction we may be sure she would have been caustically
and penetratingly ironical.
THE EXPLANATION OF OSCAR WILDE
The case of Oscar Wilde, as one of the high tragedies of English
Literature and Life, attracted the attention of the whole world in its
heyday, and even today evokes controversy. As a literary figure and
artist, the poet of the Portrait of Dorian Gray, and "De Profundis,"
belongs without a doubt to the immortals. As a convicted criminal, who
served for two years at hard labor in Reading jail, and afterwards,
a prey to chronic alcoholism, died in obscurity in Paris, he still
remains a subject of whispered conversation in private, and his crime
a taboo to the public, mentionable only at the risk of arousing the
terrible odium sexicum of the prurient majority. Oscar Wilde was a
homosexual of a certain type. In view of the previously laid down
considerations concerning the endocrine genesis of homosexuality, how
are we to explain him, and his natural history?
As with the other exemplars of genius examined we need here, too, to
gain some insight into his "internal secretion heredity." His father,
Sir William Wilde, was a surgeon. Photographs of him show the long
and broad face of a pituito-adrenal centered individual, with
a corresponding duplex incarnation in the face, the upper half
strikingly spiritual, the lower curiously animal.
He was active, practical and eminently successful. His wife recalls
Florence Nightingale, in face, figure and conduct (people who are
built alike as regards their internal secretions are those whom we
recognize as similar physically and psychically). She, too, was a
pituito-adrenal, and in so far resembled her husband. But as in a
woman ante-pituitary and adrenal superiority make for masculinity,
she must be classed as a masculinoid type of woman. She was socially
aggressive, and took part in the revolutionary movement of her time in
Ireland. Thus we find that Oscar Wilde was the result of a mating of
internal secretions acting in the same direction. The process might be
compared to parthenogenesis.
It is on record that when enceinte his mother often expressed the
wish that her child be a girl. When a boy was born, she was immensely
disappointed. To compensate for her disappointment, she brought him up
a good deal like a little girl. She had him dressed in girls' clothes
at an age when most boys are violent destroyers of clothing. She would
hang massive jewelry upon him, for the delight of playing with the
resultant stage picture as a satisfaction for her discontented
desires. In the light of modern psychology, and our formulization of
her endocrine status, we must put down her conduct to a suppressed
homosexual craving. Had her son been built along the lines of strong
emphatic masculinity, her influence, though vicious, would probably
have found no congenial soil, and would have died out altogether after
his contacts with the outer world, beginning with school. No matter
how she would have conditioned his vegetative system temporarily,
his internal secretions, released then from compression, would have
asserted themselves and determined his fate differently. However, it
is quite possible that if such had been the case Oscar Wilde, the
aesthete, the paradoxer, the disciple of Walter Pater and Baudelaire,
would have stayed in the land of the to be born. I mean that then
we would not have had Oscar Wilde, but another person, genius or
commonplace, who also might have borne the name of Oscar Wilde.
That was not to be. The singular assortment of endocrines that mingled
their activities to make Oscar Wilde shaped a personality which we
must classify as the thymocentric (thymus-centered). Why this should
be so is an interesting question. Pituito-adrenal plus pituito-adrenal
of his heredity should make two pituito-adrenals according to
elementary arithmetic and the rule of three. A cancellation of the two
factors of the equation rather than addition seems to have occurred.
The result was a persistent thymus superiority, with an instability of
the other two main glands involved.
How do we know that Oscar Wilde was a thymocentric? Because in his
fullest development he exhibited all the earmarks of the thymus
pattern. We possess a number of good pictures and descriptions of him,
as he was really a contemporary, and would probably be alive today
if he had been put in a hospital for proper treatment instead of in
prison. An excellent description is that of Henri de Regnier's: "This
foreigner (Wilde) was _tall_, and of _great corpulence_. A _high_
complexion seemed to give still greater width to his clean shaven
face. It was the _unbearded_ (glabre) face that one sees on coins. The
_hands_ ... were rather _fleshy_ and _plump_." The points of immediate
interest are the height, the complexion and the beardlessness. One
classic variety of the thymocentric is tall, has a baby's skin, and
has little or no hair on the face. A passage from a narrative written
by one of his warders confirms the last condition decidedly. "Before
leaving his cell to see a visitor, he was alway careful to conceal, as
far as possible, his unshaven chin by means of his red handkerchief."
Bristles on the chin, with little or none on the cheeks, is the
inference. It is important to stress the thymocentric significance of
this glabrosity of the face. Another sign to be put in italics was the
quality of his voice. It has been described as a beautiful tenor, when
he had it under perfect control, and high pitched and strident when
under the influence of passion or temper. Such a voice would be the
product of a larynx remaining partly or completely in the infantile
state, as in a woman's. That, and the large breasts he is said to have
had, point again to the thymus-centered constitution. All in
all, there can be no doubt that Oscar Wilde was a case of status
lymphaticus, the technical name for the thymus-centered personality.
As happens in a number of thymocentrics, his pituitary must have
attempted to compensate for the endocrine deficiencies always present
in them. The exceptional size of his head was a pituitary trait.
Finding, possibly making, plenty of room for itself to grow, for some
unknown reason, in an extraordinary fashion, it reinforced the love of
the beautiful that is part of the feminine post-pituitary nature, with
an intellectual ability and maturity that was at first all-conquering.
In the face of a society organized for pure masculine and pure
feminine types, disgrace and disaster at last overtook him with almost
the ruthlessness of natural selection wiping out an unadapted sport
suddenly cropping up in an environment. In prison he suffered from
severe splitting headaches, which were probably due to changes in his
pituitary. Described as being directly over the eyes, they haunted him
until his death, and may have had a good deal to do with the absinthe
addiction he acquired.
THE TREATMENT OF GENIUS
The problem of Oscar Wilde raises an ethical question that still
remains to be finally answered. Granting that all of society should
one day see him and his kind as a peculiar and specific constitutional
product of an odd intermixture of internal secretions, what should
be done with him and them? It is easy to play with words like
"degenerates." But still, we do not condemn imbeciles, idiots or
defectives, or other substandard, subnormal creatures to the prisons.
For the sake of the good opinion society would maintain of itself,
it sends the latter nowadays to hospitals, sanitaria, or their
equivalents, where protection for itself without punishment for them
may be practised. But is confinement, or even treatment the solution?
For we have to consider what society would lose by cutting such
abnormals off from itself, and them from its stimulations. A number
of artists have been built like Oscar Wilde, musicians in particular.
Without them, would there not be a great gap, a yawning absence, in
the world's culture?
Modern diagnosis and modern therapy might have done a great deal for
Napoleon, Nietzsche, Julius Caesar, Florence Nightingale, Oscar Wilde.
Were they alive today, and willing to submit themselves to scientific
scrutiny, the X-ray would tell us of the state of the pituitary and
thymus in them, chemical examinations of the blood the condition of
the thyroid and adrenals, detailed investigation of the body and mind
a flood of light upon their maladies as well as their personalities.
Therapy might have relieved Napoleon of his attacks, and so, halting
the creeping degeneration of his pituitary, made Waterloo impossible.
But then, would we have had the Emperor at all? Would there have been
enough of that instability that drives on the genius to his goal?
Nietzsche might have been relieved of his headaches, and Caesar of
his epilepsy--but then, would not--with correction of the underlying
streams of activity on the part of the other glands of the internal
secretion to compensate--their peculiar superiority and distinction,
and the fruits of their lives as by-products, have been destroyed.
Florence Nightingale, too, might have been a softer and more human
person. But then would she have revolutionized the practice of
nursing? Oscar Wilde possibly might have been made over into a
heterosexual. But then would not the world be the poorer without "De
Profundis," let us ask? To state the problem in the most general
terms: how much abnormality are we to tolerate (I speak, of course, of
malignant abnormality, and disregard benign abnormality altogether)
for the sake of the valuable that is concomitant? How much are we
to stand of that which degrades the germ-plasm while it raises the
mind-plasm of the race? The Flowers of Evil. Destroy or modify the
roots, change the seed, and the buds will bloom, if at all, not
orchids, but dull brown commonplaces.
What means may be licensed for the attainment of a worthy end is
perhaps the broadest aspect of the problem. The instruments of Man's
ascent to divinity may arouse his instinctive repulsions, dislikes,
and destructive passions. The study of the internal secretions is
putting and will put the most powerful apparatus for the control of
the abnormal into our hands. What are we going to do with them?
It does not follow that because we are beginning to understand the
normal that we are to establish one fixed absolute standard of the
normal. In view of all the possible mixtures, permutations and
combinations of the endocrine glands, that may construct an
individual, it is possible to conceive a million types of normals.
For normality means harmony, the harmonious equilibrium between the
hormones, which tends to continue itself, because it does no harm to
itself. So there are all sorts and conditions of men and women who
are classed as normals. We need create no inquiry into the value of
raising the subnormal to the normal level. It is when we come to
consider the possibility of lowering the supernormal (in certain
respects) to the normal, that we pause and hesitate. Traditional
morality assists not, but hinders us here.
Whatever the race may ultimately decide, it is safe to predict that it
is now somewhat possible, and will become more and more possible, to
regulate or even check the ills of genius, without interfering with
its highest evolution and expression. For example, Bernard Shaw, to
take a living man of genius, is pretty visibly a pituitocentric of the
well-balanced variety. He has the height, the facial features, the
hands, and the sort of mentality that run together in his endocrine
make-up. He also has the headaches. It is quite probable that feeding
him pituitary gland extract in the proper dosage would relieve him of
his headaches. A process might be started in his pituitary, however,
that would diminish its extraordinary output which has assisted
to make his brain so brilliant. The possibility, nevertheless,
is excessively remote as the pituitary predominance in him is so
overwhelming, that nothing short of surgery, nature's or the medical
graduate's, could really affect that overmastering eminence. The time
will come, though it is not yet by a long, long road, when we shall
be able to intervene, and perhaps meddle, in nature's most intimate
plans. The right of the power to modify, like the power to kill, will
be defined and limited by common agreement before that goal will be
reached.
CHAPTER XII
APPLICATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES
The knowledge that the shape and action of a man's body as well as
his mind depend on the internal secretions inspires the hope of the
emergence of a hitherto inconceivable controlling power over human
life in the future. For in the wake of chemical discovery there has
always come chemical control. The nature of chemical research, the
necessity for clear thinking, accurate measurement, and experience
in the actual handling of materials, the fundamental tradition and
technique of the science, have made and will make the practical
applications about which we today may only speculate. What the study
of the internal secretions suffers from, at the beginning of the third
decade of the twentieth century, is insufficient appreciation of its
meaning for mankind. It is true that there are thousands of workers
scattered throughout the world contributing their mites to the general
store. They increase yearly, almost daily, and their achievements,
in spite of an uncritical enthusiasm in some quarters and a
semi-charlatanism in others, have been and continue magnificent. But
they are pecking at a mountain which requires organized, massive,
engineering organization for its blasting.
The crying need is for an international institute, endowed and
equipped for investigation upon the proper scale, with all the
available appliances and methods already worked out and at hand. Such
an institution would possess the right chemical laboratories for
the making of blood analyses, metabolism examinations, and tests of
endocrine functions. There would be X-ray machines and experts to
radiograph the pituitary, pineal and thymus glands when possible.
There would be psychologists to carry out intelligence tests,
determine emotional reactions, and group mental aberrations,
deficiencies and defectives. There would be statisticians, trained in
biometrics, to criticize and compare data obtained. There would be
anthropoligists to note and measure variations in angles and curves,
ratios and quotients of the external conformation of the body.
Internists would record the history and status of the organs and
viscera. There would be librarians to collect, abstract and collate
the vast, accumulating literature. In short, the mystery of
personality, the most marvelous, complex, and variable process in the
universe, would be attacked and at length penetrated systematically
and persistently, with the ideal of absolute control of its
composition as the goal in view.
The nature of the researches? They would be infinite in their variety
and significance. Their practical by-products, dropped in the pursuit
of knowledge by the scientist, as Atalanta's lover the golden apples
in his race, to assuage the scent of the hard-headed business man,
would be profitable enough for any country in peace or war, to pay
for itself ten times over and at compound interest. A volume could be
filled with suggestions for interesting and promising investigations.
But we may glance at some of the immediately useful aspects that might
exercise those concerned with the everyday life of men, women and
children.