The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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THE ENDOCRINE EPOCHS OF LIFE
There is no more famous classifications of the epochs of life
that mark off the milestones of the individual's evolution than
Shakespeare's Seven Ages. So different is he at those different stages
of his development, so changed his body and mind that it has become a
part of popular physiology that we are entirely made over every seven
years, and that no cell in the organism lasts longer than that. The
tradition certainly does not apply to the brain and nervous system,
for the number of brain cells is fixed at birth, and cannot be
increased, only decreased, because they are too highly specialized to
reproduce themselves.
What transfigures the individual as the years go by is no simple wear
and tear of the tissues, nor the replacement of old cells by new. It
is the rearrangement of relationships among the ductless glands, the
shifting of influences from the predominant to the subordinate, and
vice versa, in the constellation of the internal secretions, that
determines the unfolding of the personality. The transformations raise
doubt sometimes as to the reality of personal identity. What actually
happens in the changes from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence
to maturity, and so on, is the sloughing of one internal glandular
dominance for another.
Growth, as a general name for the mutations, the ensemble of somatic
and psychic differentiation, from year to year, passes through five
epochs that are standard for the normal. The normal is the being who
harmonizes with his environment, and yet reacts with it because of
recurring needs within him. His endocrine equation settles what is
unique and different in him. But the gland which flourishes during the
epoch as its time of triumph, when it has its day, determines what
makes him like his fellows.
From this point of view it becomes permissible to speak of the five
Endocrine Epochs. Similarities and resemblances of mind and body
between people at a given period of life, childhood, youth, maturity
must be put down to their common government by the salient endocrine
of the epoch. So one may list:
Infancy as the epoch of the thymus
Childhood as the epoch of the pineal
Adolescence as the epoch of the gonads
Maturity as the epoch of whatever gland is left in control as the
result of the life struggle.
Senility as the epoch of general endocrine deficiency.
Infancy as the epoch of the thymus explains why, in any given
geographic locality, the babies look alike and act alike. Specialists
in the observation and treatment of infants have noted that not until
after the second year is any tendency to differentiation discernible
to any extent among them. It is only after the second year, or
somewhere around that time, that the child begins to individuate, and
distinct individual traits and a personality manifest their outlines.
The thymus is the great inhibitor of all the glands of internal
secretion. By its checking activity upon the other members of the
endocrine system, the thyroid and pituitary in particular, it gives
the baby time to grow in bulk, which is its chief business during the
first two years of its existence. It quadruples its birth weight. The
brain and nervous system complete their growth in mass by the end of
the fourth year. Recall the experiments of Gudernatsch working with
tadpoles, who showed that feeding with thymus produced giant tadpoles
whose metamorphosis into frogs was inhibited, while feeding thyroid
produced frogs the size of flies. Differentiation occurred without the
preliminary increase in mass usual. As differentiation and bulk thus
appear antagonistic, at least at the beginning of growth, the function
of the thymus, at a maximum during infancy, seems then to be to
restrain the differentiating endocrines, until sufficient material
has been accumulated by the organism upon which the differentiating
process may work.
After the second year, the thymus begins to shrink. That is to say,
officially its involution begins. Careful dissection will demonstrate
some thymus tissue even in a normal subject up to the fourteenth year.
This refers to the average normal, for the large thymus may continue
large and grow larger after the second year in the type of individual
designated in a preceding chapter as the thymocentric.
If the thymus retrogresses after the second year, what takes its place
as a brake upon the forward driving impulses of the other endocrines?
We have every reason for assigning that role to the pineal. It
performs its service mainly, in all probability, by inhibiting the
sex stimulating effect of light playing upon the skin. Since it is
especially a sex gland inhibitor, the thyroid and pituitary become
freer to exert their influences than under the thymus regime. And so
we find that it is after the second year that thyroid and pituitary
tendencies manifest their effects. The Pineal Era, from the second
to the tenth to fourteenth years, remains to be investigated from a
number of viewpoints interesting to the parent, the educator, and
the student of puericulture. Precocity is directly related to early
involution of the pineal. For just as the thymus involutes at the
second year, the pineal atrophies before the onset of adolescence.
Adolescence is the period of stress and strain throughout the somatic
and psychic organism because of the volcanic upheavals in the sex
glands. The history of the individual is dominated by them up to
twenty-five or so, when maturity commences in the sense of a relative
sex stability. They continue to exert a powerful pressure throughout
maturity. But life episodes and crises, diseases, accidents, and
struggles, experiences of pleasure and pain, as well as climatic
factors, settle finally which endocrine or endocrines are left in
control as a consequence of the series of reactions the period of
maturity may be analyzed into.
THE INTERPRETATION OF SENILITY
Senility inevitably follows maturity, not as night follows day by a
mathematical necessity, but because of the process of degeneration
which ultimately overtakes all the glands of internal secretion,
dominant as well as subordinate. Just why the degeneration must occur
no one can say. Injury to the endocrine organs of one sort or another,
ranging all the way from emotional exhaustion to bacterial infection,
is the reason usually considered sufficient. Just why recuperation and
regeneration do not preserve them in the elderly as they do in youth
is a problem to be solved when we understand the laws of regeneration,
at present almost totally beyond our control. Some say that it is a
matter of the wear and tear of our blood vessels, those rubber-like
tubes which transport food and drainage with nonchalant equanimity to
all cells as long as they last. In the classic phrase: a man is as
old as his arteries, ergo his ductless glands will be as old as their
arteries. And the age of arteries is simply a matter of wear and tear,
the resultant of the function which is universal among molecules.
Arteriosclerosis, the hardening of arteries, might be the whole story.
But there are certain experiments and considerations which rather
confute that easy explanation, or at least make clear that the mystery
is not so simple. The work of Steinach, a Viennese investigator, has
contributed most to the elucidation of the nonarterial factor in
senility. No one has asserted more loudly the importance of the
interstitial cells that fill in the spaces between the tubules of the
testes in the male, and the follicles of the ovary in females. Rats
have been his medium of study, for they are most easily procurable,
live fastest, breed, and withstand experimental and operative
procedures better than any other animal.
An old rat is like an old man in his dotage. His bald, shrivelled skin
covers an emaciated body. His eyes are dimmed by cataracts and his
breathing is labored and difficult because his heart muscle has lost
its tone. Huddled in a corner, life to him has become concentrated
into the desire for a little food, and immobility. If now, something
is done to his sex apparatus, a marvelous transformation may be
effected. That something no one could predict. It consists in slitting
the genital duct, which leads from the germinal cells to the exterior.
After the operation, the germinal cells, which grow into the
spermatozoa, atrophy and disappear, since they can no longer function.
As if released from some restraint, the interstitial cells, however,
multiply enormously. With their multiplication, the miracle of
rejuvenation is performed.
After some weeks the sluggish currents of being in the rat, which had
slowed down as a preliminary to stopping altogether, flow fast and
furious. Waves of new chemical substances inundate his cells. And they
respond like the fields that border the Nile after the annual flood.
All his tissues, skin, muscle, nerve, even bone, are restored. A
vitality is created which makes him bound and dart like a youth of his
species. In due time, though, senility returns. It is as if a storage
battery, recharged, runs down and becomes dead again. Slitting the
genital duct of the other testis, causing its interstitial cells to
hypertrophy and multiply, repeats the effects of the first experiment.
The organism responds again to the new waves of vitality that vibrate
through it. That it is recharged is demonstrated again by a revival of
sex appetite and sex activity. The female which had become an object
of indifference is reinstated as a creature to be sought and pursued.
The second period ends in its turn. And now entirely new interstitial
glands, in the form of fresh testes removed from a young animal, are
transplanted into the body of the old rat. Once more youth returns.
But now it burns itself more quickly than even before. An acute
exhaustion of the mind appears first. Then all the other phenomena of
old age steal back upon the old rat, and senility, firmly established
in the saddle, rides him to the end.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF REJUVENATION
Whatever other deductions may be extracted from these experiments,
they prove beyond a doubt the existence of an endocrine factor in the
process of aging, as well as an arterial. They also demonstrate that
the internal secretion of the sex glands, well advertised as it has
been as the Elixir of Youth that Ponce de Leon, and Brown-Sequard with
so many others, pursued in vain, is not the whole story. For if it
was, the duration of the new youth should be another span of life,
whereas in actuality it is only a fraction of that time. This fact,
together with a number of others, make clear that while the gonads may
be the jeune premier of the drama, the vitality of the plot depends
upon the other endocrines. Since old age is an exhaustion, permanent
and irreparable of _all_ the members of the ductless gland
directorate, the reason becomes clear for the temporary quality of the
rejuvenation effected by the procedures of Steinach.
Practically, then, the question at once arises: which of the glands in
particular are involved? There is first that ubiquitous agent in the
system, the thyroid. Chemical analysis of it has shown that the
iodine content decreases with the age of the individual, and becomes
specially low after forty. It is after the menopause in women that
myxedema, the disease of complete degeneration of the thyroid, and of
the physical and mental faculties, is most frequent. The thyroid
of old people exhibits, in varying degrees, signs of a similar
degeneration. Thyroid feeding, properly controlled, will clear up
certain of the deteriorations of mind and body observable in the aged.
The grossness of the features lessens, a number of the pains go,
muscular endurance increases, memory and intelligence do not remind
one so forcibly of the old dotard in his second childhood. Of course
the improvement at present achievable is only relative. But in the
prematurely aging, decay invading a half accomplished maturity,
marvels have been achieved at times with feeding of the gland.
The pituitary, too, begins to retrogress after the period of maturity.
And an early retrogression means a short maturity. In women, the onset
of an obesity, and coincidently, of a lazy and dull morale, coincides
with this declension of the pituitary powers. All the glands of
internal secretion, in fact, shrink and shrivel as old age advances.
Only, as in other relationships, the predominating endocrine stamps
its signature more visibly upon the documents of decadence than the
others. Pituitary types, as said, get fat and slow, thyroidal become
bulky and stupid or thin and sour, the adrenal dark, shrunken and
forever tired of life. So type emerges, even in all-around glandular
deficiency.
The problem of rejuvenation is the problem of recharging, or replacing
all of the glands of internal secretion, at least the most important,
the thyroid, the pituitary and the adrenals, as well as the gonads.
Longevity is perhaps largely a matter of preventing, or postponing
their wane. Beside, there is the prophylaxis of bacterial infections,
and their all embracing corrosions--which, too, have an endocrine
aspect.
Persistence of youth or juvenility may be manufactured by nature in
two ways. There may be a persistence of early glandular predominances.
We have seen what happens to the thymocentric. That a pineal-centered
juvenile or infantile type exists may be safely predicted. Nature's
only other mode of securing perpetual youth seems to be by prolonging
the time allotted to the sex gland crescendo.
As for the golden age of maturity itself, what humdrum people and
poets have despised as middle age, the margin of reserve of the ruling
hormone is a quantity almost malleable in our hands, but still to be
regarded with respect as a hard cold proposition by the physiologist.
In general, the continuance of any stage of development means the
maintaining of the glandular administration peculiar to it. So the
chubby debonair irresponsible whom nothing can touch is happy in the
possession of a pineal uncorrupted by the years, while the genius who
can turn out his best work at sixty-five must thank his pituitary for
standing by him to the end.
THE SCIENCE OF PUERICULTURE
There is a specialty now growing in the womb of science which in its
own good time will come to fruition as the study of the child's needs
or puericulture. Even today there exists a scientific basis for the
formulation of the principles upon which every child should be brought
up. Though we have had marvelous results from the campaigns to lower
infantile mortality, most of what has been done has been medical in
its interest, and so largely negative in its accomplishments. The
removal of the causes of evil no doubt gives the good its opportunity.
But how to raise a child, endowed with satisfactory ancestral stuff,
as a Grade A normal or supernormal, still remains to be erected into
an exact science.
A number of attempts have been abortive in this field. Why they have
failed to arouse the ardor of the parent has puzzled some of the
pioneers. Child-culture as the foundation of all systems of education
has continued more or less of a hope rather than an achievement
because of a lack of appreciation of the different constitutional
varieties of children. A certain amount of attention has been lavished
upon children needing special attention, those mainly suffering from
insufficient development of one sort or another. In the last decade or
so, an endeavour to focus upon the exceptional child, exceptional
in intelligence or some special creative endowment, has started an
interesting movement. All of them have suffered from the fallacies and
troubles of the pure psychologist who would handle mind as an entity
in a vacuum.
A realization of the different physical and psychic educational
needs of various children will arrive only when we see them as built
differently. Just as shoddy and silk, cotton and wool, alone or in
combination, all possess different qualities as wearing material, so
different children have varying capacities for the wear and tear of
education. The endocrine classification of the human race, applied
to children, will here yield a harvest to the educator and to the
country. Nothing is more evident than the diversified nature of the
needs of the various internal secretion types, once they are realized
as such.
The history of a thymocentric type, for instance, is predictable from
the very first few months of his life. Difficulties in feeding, in
habit formation and adaptation, in the reaction to infections, in
social play and so on, one may expect for him. The course of events
for the other endocrine types also follow laws of their own. It will
be above all in the _understanding_ of children, their make-up,
reactions and powers, that the biologist will achieve some of his
finest triumphs.
The educator will have to take account of the state of the pituitary
in estimating the normal intelligence, or influencing the abnormal or
subnormal intelligence. As well will he have to consider the thyroid
in the child whose conduct is refractory, even though his proficiency
in his studies is excellent. And the condition of the adrenal will be
ascertained in the types that tire easily, and that seem unable to
make the effort necessary or desirable. Periodic seasonal and critical
fluctuations in the equilibrium among the hormones will have to be
taken into account in the explanation of what have hitherto been put
down to laziness, naughtiness, stupidity, or obstinacy.
A child's capacity for education, essentially its capacity for the
highest and most productive kind of life, is limited by inherent
factors. These factors are two: the quality of the nerve tissue, its
ability to make a number of associations, and the quantity of the
internal secretions, measured by the maximum obtainable in a given
situation. These inherent factors explain, too, why children born
and bred in virtually the same environment show the most extreme
differences in educability. That the differences are inherited was
made evident by Galton's finding that the chance of the son of an
eminent man exhibiting eminent ability was 500 times as great as that
of the son of a man taken at random.
Every baby, then, is born with a combination of nerve cells and
ductless glands which determine its capacity for mental development,
that might never be realized, but could never be exceeded. If, in any
family, minor differences in educability are observed, they can be
put down to disturbance of these two factors occurring after the
fertilized germ cell had started to divide and reproduce itself. But
any marked falling off in either the nervous or endocrine factors has
to be considered pathologic, due to an impairment of them by adverse
environment.
Recent studies have amply established that the proportion of
certifiable mental defectives, and of a much larger class, the
subnormal but not certifiable class, is progressing by leaps and
bounds. It is perhaps the most absurd frailty of our present system
of education that it takes almost no account of innate differences in
educability. To spend money upon the teaching of these children along
lines where they are unteachable is not only waste pure and simple,
but crime, for it deprives the educables of their just due.
These, of course, are the crude and simple lines upon which the finer
and more complex evolution of the endocrine problems of the school
child will build. The fine art of education itself is crude and gross
and simple compared with what it might be, even as a beginning. The
science of education has yet to begin, as the offspring of that
science of the future, to which knowledge of the internal secretions
will contribute no little, the science of puericulture.
VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
It is difficult, indeed, to avoid becoming merely enthusiastic upon
the possibilities of the applications of the endocrines to the
educational domain. Happiness for the average individual consists of
a double success--success in his vocation (chosen or forced upon him)
and success in his sex life. A certain hue and cry has been raised in
the last few years concerning the vast and overwhelming importance of
sex in the happiness and even in the successes of a man's everyday
life. And no doubt there is a relation. Sublimation plays its part in
the explanation of vocational idiosyncrasies. The fact, however, that
perfect success in sex may occur with absolute failure in the career,
however, splits the problem for good into its realities: a physiologic
aspect as well as a psychologic.
So, as school education will have to take serious account of endocrine
anomalies and possibilities, will the institution which selects and
trains for a career. Vocational misfits have aroused the ardor of our
efficiency experts. And again, the sweeping psychological attack has
beaten its head against the stonewall of ignorance of constitutional
predispositions and tendencies of material. The attempt to erect
psychologic types for vocational selections could never make much
headway because it could only flounder in a swamp of metaphors,
product of the vices of its methods. Not that anyone would wish to
discard at all the psychologic mode of approach. But no science, in
the sense of accurate examination, was possible, in the matter of
classification for vocation, without the insight into the physiology
of the candidate that the analysis of his endocrine formula will
provide.
One need not dilate upon the value of such an examination.
Civilization has not yet learned how to pick its personnel. And so
artists and scientists, philosophers and politicians, financiers and
religious leaders, arise and survive by the operation of the laws of
probabilities and chances, rather than by any intelligent selection
and cultivation of material. The case, indeed, is simply a subdivision
of the vast subject: haphazard muddle in the conduct of life. A cry
has been raised for the superman, and a cry has been raised for a
method of anthropometry. For the lack of these two, it has been
said, all governments have been doomed to defeat. The study of the
endocrines will by no means supply a panacea. But as it will furnish a
means of approach to the determination of how men and women are built,
and why they are built differently, no one can gainsay the tremendous
advantages to the nation that will proceed to classify its population
accordingly, and know its strength and weakness in terms of the actual
generators of success and failure.
Suggestions have been offered in the preceding pages of concrete
applications of endocrine knowledge to the understanding of behaviour,
of the genius and commonplace, criminal and Puritan. And in the
chapter on historic personages, we tracked some of the story in
detail. This vein when explored will quarry untold riches. It has been
observed that financiers of mark, like great musicians, are special
pituitary types. Also that the financiers are voracious meat eaters
and the musicians inordinately fond of sweets. Differences in anterior
and posterior predominances might account for this. That we are
playing here with no phantasy is proven by the fact that we can effect
changes of tastes as well as of intellectual direction by appropriate
feeding of various glandular extracts. Just as much, indeed, as we can
influence sex susceptibility, and the reaction to sex stimulation, by
the artificial introduction from without of the proper hormones.
FATIGUE AND INDUSTRY
In industry, business and profession, the biologist will come more and
more to be called as consultant. Labor unions as well as the large
employers of labor, and their employment managers have given much
thought to the problem of fatigue. Just what fatigue is, why different
individuals tire at different rates, why some are constructed for
monotonous routine while others must have constant variety and change,
the relation to accidents and to quantity output, are a few of the
major lines of inquiry upon which the endocrines obviously have a
large bearing. To the employment manager, labor turnover and the
selection of personnel are adjacent fields of research.
Fatigue as an endocrine deficiency--a depressed state of one or
more of the glands of internal secretion, abolished when its normal
functioning is restored--is a general principle from which departures
of exploration of sub-problems will proceed. An endocrine organ will
secrete at a certain rate. When it is stimulated excessively, it will
eject extra amounts of its secretion. How long the period of excessive
stimulation may last must depend upon the secretion potential or
margin of reserve of the cells, varying from organ to organ, and from
individual to individual. After that, exhaustion and failure follows,
with the onset of the symptoms of fatigue.
A pretty demonstration of this process has been worked out in the
electrical stimulation of muscle. If a muscle, say the biceps, is
irritated by an electric current, it will contract. As the strength of
the current is increased, the degree of contraction becomes greater.
A sort of stepladder effect of increasing contractions may be thus
obtained. After a time, the electric shocks cannot cause a greater
contraction, but only a lesser. And if continued, the muscle will
cease to function because of fatigue. If now, when the muscle begins
to lag in its response, and its contractions to decrease, one injects
into a vein extracts of thyroid, parathyroid, or adrenal glands, they
will immediately reinvigorate the failing contractions. The injections
must be made before the fatigue is carried to the point of absolute
exhaustion. It follows that these glands normally pour into the
circulation substances which counteract the effect of fatigue
substances, and in fact make possible muscular recuperation from
fatigue throughout the day as well as in emergencies and crises.