The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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Fatigue, conventionally recognized, is something acute and urgent. As
such it means a violent draining of the endocrine wells. But there
is also a chronic fatigue, which has been dignified with the name of
Fatigue Disease. Bernard Shaw once asked for someone to tell him
the name of the germ causing the symptoms of overwork. That being
impossible, he will have to be satisfied with the answer that it is
not a germ, but an internal secretion, or rather a defect of internal
secretion that is the cause.
Whether or not the adrenals have been damaged by past experiences,
and upon their capacity to respond to the necessities of an occasion,
fatigue reactions primarily depend. A quotation from Sir James
MacKenzie, most distinguished of modern English students of medicine,
summarizes the matter neatly. "Abelous, and Langlois and Albanese have
studied the relation of the adrenal bodies to fatigue.... They infer
that the muscular weakness following removal of the adrenals is due
to toxic substances. In view of our present knowledge of the
physiological action of adrenaline in its various forms, it seems more
probable that the weakness is to be explained by the absence of the
normal tone producing internal secretions of the bodies in question."
In other words, the adrenals regulate muscle tone. They produce
nature's tonics for weary tissues. The chronic lassitude of thousands
of our generation, suffering from "that tired feeling," may be put
down to chronic adrenal insufficiency.
It requires no superlative imagination to see that an adrenal poor
subject does not belong upon a job that involves muscle stress over a
long period, or indeed fatiguing conditions of any sort. Nor that a
thyroid poor individual is not the best choice for a position that
demands a keen, alert body and mind. In the selection of executives,
the nature and stamina of the pituitary will undoubtedly be taken very
seriously in the near future.
A certain hocus-pocus concerning character reading, a perverted
revival of the ancient phrenology and physiognomy, has invaded the
employment territory in America as the newest charlatanism. The study
of the internal secretions, including blood and X-ray examinations,
will surely assist the demand for a truly scientific estimate
of constitution and character that can be relied upon in the
classification and distribution of personnel.
THE PROSPECTS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH
By their effects upon the endocrines, public health influences like
food, clothing, sleep and overpressure and last but not least,
_disease_, the so-called diseases of childhood, possess a tremendous
importance in limiting the output of the educable. They act to
subtract from and so to lower the rating, the capacity of the
germ-plasm. Most material and vital of these influences are the common
diseases of children, for they strike directly at the glands of
internal secretion.
Measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps, and the others have long
been accepted as providential visitations for sins known or unknown.
That children had to have them and were better off when they had them
has become part of the tradition of the laity, fostered by the lazy
ignorance of previous medical generations. But today we are beginning
to ask ourselves why children must have these endemic infections
of their age. The pathologist goes farther and asks the reason for
certain apparent immunities. He asks why the little boy who sleeps
with his brother sick with scarlet fever does not contract the
disease, even though not protected by a previous attack.
Determining why susceptibility to a special disease in a particular
case exists will constitute the greatest line of advance for the
understanding and prevention of disease, and so the perfection of
public health. In the last influenza epidemic countless physicians
were puzzled by the spectacle of men and women in the pink of
condition carried off in twenty-four hours while puny associates were
either passed over, or pooh-poohed their colds. Pathologists have
spent their energies fruitfully upon the infectious causes of disease,
the microbes and parasites especially. But now, having solved most of
those problems, the vital question of why an organism permits itself
to be attacked is pushing itself to the front. Why a peculiar ailment
selects its victim, why the bacillus finds a fertile soil, is the
neglected problem, which must be solved before the abolition of
disease and its carriers will be remotely conceivable.
Long ago, Hippocrates, revered founder of the art of medicine,
recognized that there was a specific affinity of disease for
individuals with more or less the same characteristic somatic and
psychic traits and trends. Tuberculosis, for instance, was noted for
its frequency in long-skeletoned, thin persons, remarkably optimistic.
And the plethoric, choleric nature of the sufferer from gout has
become proverbial. Before the era of the great bacteriologic
discoveries of the eighties and nineties, the concordance of esoteric
racial and personal markings was a great help in diagnosis to the
physician. For he realized, though he sometimes credited it to his
clinical intuition, that it was a certain type of personality that was
liable to the specific disease.
But personality and its reactions, normal and abnormal, are determined
by the endocrines. So we should find that particular infections
run with special internal glandular predominances. For the picture
presented by an infection, temperature, rash, prostration, are the
details of the general reaction of the organism in the face of a
new situation, the presence of a powerful, destructive invader.
Information has accumulated that the invader is powerful and
destructive, as well as selective, because of endocrine deficiency of
one sort or another in the body it has attacked. Work of a number of
investigators has indicated that an individual's susceptibility or its
reverse, resistance, is intimately subjected to the derangements or
harmonies of the endocrine system.
Comparison of the endocrine type and the disease assaulting has
yielded an even more interesting principle. Knowing the state of the
internal secretion reservoirs enables us to predict the liability to
certain of these infections of childhood. Diphtheria has been found to
occur most virulently among adrenal poor individuals. Moreover, they
are left poorer in adrenal afterwards. It follows that they would be
assisted by the feeding of adrenal. Mumps is a sickness that sometimes
permanently injures the gonads: the testes or ovaries. The thyroid
dominant, whose system is rich in thyroid, will rarely suffer from any
of the common diseases of children--if at all, from measles. Op the
other hand, those who have every infection of the period, and who, as
their mothers say, seem to get everything, are those whose system
is thyroid poor. Thyroid poverty is a splendid enticement to the
universal microbe. The thymocentric stands all diseases poorly. The
pituitary type is more liable to epidemic meningitis and infantile
paralysis, typhoid and scarlet fever.
The public health officer of the future will be armed with a new
weapon in his fight against the spread of an epidemic. He will be able
to classify the endocrine traits of the population exposed, and to
advise a course of glandular feeding for the types specially liable.
The Schick test for diphtheria susceptibility is an illustration
of one method of approach to the problem of the epidemiologist in
settling who needs protection. The endocrines will assist him in the
great body of diseases for which no immunity test is at hand. Should
another influenza epidemic come along, for instance, the proper
handling, from the endocrine standpoint, of the thymocentrics and
the related adrenocentrics would help considerably in lowering the
mortality.
Endocrine types have other tendencies, which when studied and
controlled, will decimate the great assassins of middle age: heart
disease and kidney disease, with accompanying degenerations of the
blood vessels and circulation. The adrenocentric tends to get up a
hyperacidity of the stomach and a high blood pressure, besides certain
forms of diseases of the lungs. The thyrocentric is predisposed to
heart disease, as well as intestinal disturbances. The pituitocentric
is liable to periodic and cyclic upsets in his health.
Narcotism, the craving for narcotic or stimulant drugs, and its
subvariety, alcoholism, has been found most often among the
thymocentrics. Any type of endocrine inferiority, interfering with
success in life, may lead to the habit of drug addiction as one way
out. But the blood and tissues of the thymocentric appear to become
habituated to the narcotic stimulant more easily than the other types,
and so to demand it with a physical imperative comparable to the food
or sex urge. Among artists, philosophers and statesmen, on the other
hand, actively productive and so contrasted with criminals and
degenerates drug addiction has frequently been a mode of endocrine
compensation. That is, the drug produced temporarily the effects of
the internal secretion lacking or insufficient. Thus the effects of
cocaine may be compared with the effects of thyroid. But while there
is a normal mechanism for thyroid detoxication, the cocaine or heroin
derivatives mark the tissues permanently with their scars and deform
the personality.
THE HYGIENE OF THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS
All these protean expressions of endocrine determination may now begin
to be looked upon with the hopeful and optimistic attitude of him who
understands cause and effect and can control. The advances made in the
last ten years in the practical manipulation of the ductless glands
from without, the introduction of glandular extracts by feeding or
injection, and the modification of their structure and function by
surgery, the X-ray and radium, and other procedures, enable us
to regard more confidently the problems hitherto accepted as the
insoluble and intricate handiwork of Fate. Fate may have woven the
patterns of our being. But as we commence to probe the machinery and
to examine the looms more carefully, we begin to understand why the
wheels creak, and why there are seconds and odd lots in the product as
well as the rare and precious firsts. Moreover, we are learning how to
handle the machinery ourselves. The abdication of Fate can therefore
be confidently expected in due time.
However, we have yet to begin, and we can begin with prevention. The
theory of Adler, that some organ inferiority is responsible for much
unhappiness in life has received much advertisement in conjunction
with the doctrines of the Freudians. It is a theory of little scope
when applied to the eyes, ears, heart and so on because only a small
minority of the cases are of that kind. But as we have seen, a
deficiency of an internal secretion, an endocrine inferiority,
reverberates throughout all the cells. Not only the mind, but all of
the members of the organism must strain and co-operate to make up for
the break in the balance.
Endocrine inferiority is indeed the most frequent organic inferiority.
And we may explain a number of mental types upon that basis. Thus the
inferior gonado-centric, who has something wrong with his reproductive
organs, will evolve in one of two directions. If his adrenal and
thyroid are of poor quality, he will become the secluded introvert,
shut off from the interests of normal life. He will enter the
borderland of insanity if pituitary difficulties supervenes. If, on
the contrary, the adrenal, thyroid and pituitary are present in
a certain proportion, he will become the active, aggressive,
never-resting, keen, and relentless fanatic reformer. A woman who is
gonad deficient with a superior adrenal will suffer from virilism
and specialize in the extreme tactics and mythology of the feminist
movement. A number of life reactions are classifiable as the strivings
of endocrine inferior individuals to overcome their sense of
inferiority. The unconscious vegetative system and the system of
consciousness are both modified by the weakness of a link in the
glandular chain.
What, therefore, is to be recommended in the prophylaxis of the
natural deterioration of the wells of life, the ductless glands? For
even if we may be able to replenish them when they dry up, would it
not be better to delay their dessication? The hormones reply to every
call of life and respond in every reaction. The normal constructive
process of their cells remanufactures what has been lost, and the
original capacity to respond is restored. If, though, the rate of
destruction and loss outruns the rate of repair and construction, they
will be permanently damaged. This is what occurs in shock, serious,
severe accidents and injuries, prolonged infections and diseases,
profound continued emotions, and the wear and tear of overwork. The
prevention of these excessive fatigues of the endocrine system in one
or all of its parts, and especially the prevention and enfeeblement of
the diseases of children which injure them at a period when they are
most sensitive to injury, is the task of the endocrine hygienist.
Periodic examinations, to check up the balance sheets of the hormone
factories and to measure the amount of their damage by means of blood
analyses, will provide the most valuable method in the campaign to
lengthen the productive and enjoying span of life.
THE TREATMENT OF CRIME
Endocrine hygiene will discover no wider or more fruitful area for
exploration and control than that of crime. For more than a generation
there have been attempts at a criminology, and a new understanding and
control of crime. In the United States a concomitant sentimentalism
has concocted measures like the honor system which, naturally failing
of their purpose, have undermined confidence in the idea of scientific
diagnosis and treatment of crime. As someone has noted, to ask a
criminal to promise not to misbehave, when discharged from prison,
is like asking a typhoid fever patient to promise not to have a
temperature above ninety-nine degrees the next morning. For a large
proportion of criminals--the percentage has yet to be determined,
although the most recent police commissioner of Chicago has estimated
it at ninety per cent--punishment for a period of time and then
letting him go free is like imprisoning a diphtheria carrier for a
while and then permitting him to commingle with his fellows and spread
the germ of diphtheria.
Of course, the doctrine of responsibility is all tangled up with our
attitude towards and treatment of crime. Though clear thought makes
mandatory the recognition of a universal cause and effect law,
practical common sense has defined free will. Consent or the
withholding of consent to a given course of action has been the
criterion of responsibility.
In practice, the limitation of responsibility will depend upon the
insertion of extraneous factors into the formula of consent. The
pragmatic test has been and will be the probability that the
correction of the somatic or psychic condition would have prevented or
will prevent the consent to the crime. As long as no such condition
will be demonstrable, society for its own protection will have to
confine the unfortunate individual.
The character of the confinement, its duration, and the uses to which
it will be put should be dominated by the idea of discovering
the unknown criminal predisposition. If crime is an abnormality
scientifically studiable and controllable like measles, court
procedure and prison management will have to be transformed radically.
There is scattered throughout the world now a group of people who are
applying medical methods to the diagnosis and treatment of crime. They
are the pioneers who will be remembered in history as the compeers of
those who transformed the attitudes toward insanity and its therapy.
The insane were once condemned and handled as criminals are in most
civilized countries yet. The criminologic laboratory as an adjunct to
the court of justice, like that associated with the court of
Chief Justice Olson in Chicago, remains to be universalized. What
contribution to a more rational treatment of the criminal will the
study of the internal secretions make?
It has been shown that the greater number of convicts are mentally and
morally subnormal. To explain the subnormality, the criminologist
has conducted and will continue to conduct investigations into the
heredity and early environment of the criminal, his education and
occupation, the social and religious influences to which he was
subjected, and the intelligence test quotient. The conditioning of the
vegetative system and the endocrine status of the prisoner, however,
will without a doubt come to occupy the leading positions in any
interpretation of crime in the future.
Introspective observation of pre-criminal states of mind by so-called
normal persons reveals that in many of them there is an impairment of
reason and will power, in others an exaltation amounting almost
to hysteria. What are these but endocrine states of the cells,
experimentally reproducible by increasing or decreasing the influence
of the thyroid, the adrenals, the pituitary? Crimes of passion may be
traced in no small part to disturbances of the thyroid. A psychologic
examiner of a Pittsburgh court, interested in the subject, has found
an enlarged thyroid in over ninety per cent of delinquent girls.
Similarly, crimes of violence may be ascribed to a profound break
in the adrenal equilibrium. Criminal tendencies in women during
menstruation and pregnancy, periods of deep-seated mutation in the
internal glandular system, have long been noted. A kleptomania,
uncontrollable desire to steal, confined to the duration of pregnancy
alone, has been described. We have seen how the thymocentric,
especially if he possesses a small bony case for his pituitary, is
predisposed to crime. A recent study of twenty murderers in the State
of West Virginia showed them all to have a persistent thymus and the
thymocentric constitution. A study of the recidivists, those who
return for second and third offences, in one institution, disclosed
that a large majority had a subnormal temperature and an increased
heart and breathing rate. These are endocrine-controlled functions.
Conduct, normal or abnormal, being the resultant of the conflict of
conscious and subconscious impulses and inhibitions, the internal
secretions as controllers of the susceptibility of the brain cells to
impulses and inhibitions, must be held accountable for a portion at
least of the chemical reactions behind crime.
It is possible, by X-ray treatment of the thymus, to cause it to
shrink to more normal proportions. It is possible, by feeding various
glandular extracts, to correct deficiencies or excesses of their
function, and so to remedy the underlying basis for a criminal career.
Here and there work of this kind has been successfully carried out in
selected instances. What a suitable drive upon the whole matter would
yield in happiness to the individual and dollars and cents to society,
time alone will show.
CHAPTER XIII
THE EFFECT UPON HUMAN EVOLUTION
The ubiquitous and deep-seated influence of the internal secretions
upon life and personality comprises but a fraction of what is known,
and only a hint of what is to become known. There is an endocrine
aspect to every human being and every human activity, normal and
abnormal, internal process and its external expression, regulated
by laws of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse. Their control
promises us now a dominion over the most intimate and inaccessible
recesses of our lives in a way comparable only to the control we now
exercise over the forces and energies once revered as the instruments
of the gods--light, heat, magnetism, electricity. We have learned how
to control and change our environment. We are now learning, endocrine
research is now discovering, how to control and change ourselves.
The story of the evolution of the two types of control has many
analogies. When man ceased looking upon his surroundings as inhabited
by spirits of good and evil, as he conceived himself, and discovered
that they were composed of things malleable and analysable in his
hands, he became their master. When now he drops the old superstitions
about himself as a spirit, an emulsion of a spirit of good and spirit
of evil, and sees himself more and more clearly as the most complex
of chemical reactions, regulated and determined as are the simple
and complex chemical reactions around him, he will begin to rule and
modify himself as he rules and modifies them. Whether or not he will
ultimately come to this final lucidity of thought and action, it
behooves us to consider some of the uses to which our present
knowledge might be put.
Since every step of the daily routine or adventure, from waking to
sleeping, eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, working,
idling, fighting, playing, feeling, enjoying, sorrowing, every shade
of emotion and nuance of mood, in short every phase of happiness
and unhappiness, are endocrine episodes in the life history of the
individual, the sphere of applications is as long and broad and deep
as life itself. Not only do the internal secretions open up before us
the great hope--that Life at last will cease to stumble and grope and
blunder, manacled by the iron chains of inexorable cause and effect.
They provide tools, concrete and measurable, that can be handled and
moved, weighed and seen, for the management of the problems of human
nature and evolution.
Every department of human life, the questions of labor and industry,
science and art, education, puericulture, international problems,
crime and disease, may be illuminated. War and Sex, those two master
interests of mankind, may be understood and handled sympathetically
as they have never before. The reactions of man alone, and man in the
crowd, will be clarified. The red thread of individuality which runs
through the woof and warp of all human affairs will be unraveled.
Inevitably, customs, morals, codes of procedure and practice,
institutions, all those expressions of opinion which make conduct,
all the currents which contrive the infinite variety of life, will be
transmitted into another set of values.
A remoulding, a remodeling will take place all along the line.
Manifestly an unstable thymocentric should not be treated as a
criminal, but treated in a sanitarium. A masculinoid woman needs
satisfactions not vouchsafed in the old "love, honor and obey" home.
How absurd it is to found codes of morality upon sermons or even the
latest psychologies. During the nineteenth century progress in physics
and mechanics overturned traditions thousands of years had painfully
toiled to erect. What is to happen when man comes at last to
experiment upon himself like a god, dealing not only with the
materials without, but also with the very constituents of his
innermost being? Will he not then indeed become a god? If he does not
destroy himself before, that is surely his destiny. For better or for
worse, we possess now in the endocrines new instruments for swaying
the individual as individual, and as related to other individuals, as
a member of a type, family, nation, species and genus.
THE BASIS OF VARIATION
The sense of likeness and the sense of unlikeness plays a decisive
role in the diurnal schedule of the individual. His sense of
resemblance to his father and mother, his kin and clan, mark him and
them off against the cosmos as an alliance of defense and offense. Yet
no matter how closely he is like them and they like him, he differs
and varies, they differ and vary, with a sort of mutual forgiveness,
because the amount of resemblance overtops the degree of variation. In
a paper on the "Rediscovery of the Unique," H.G. Wells emphasized the
unique quality of the individual, and how, in spite of the cleverest
devices of classification, living things ultimately escaped the
classifying net by virtue of their tendency forever to vary.
The individual is unique. Yet when all is said and done, the fact
remains that between individuals there is resemblance, and among them
variation. What is the reason for their resemblances and what is the
cause of their variation?
The conception of a particular chemical make-up of the individual,
statable and relatively controllable in terms of the internal
secretions, supplies a more rational and satisfactory method
of approach to the problem than any so far suggested as far as
vertebrates are concerned at any rate. In effect, the differences
between individuals may fundamentally thus be grouped among the
differences which distinguish other chemical substances. The
difference between water, technically known as hydrogen monoxide,
and the antiseptic fluid labeled hydrogen dioxide lies wholly in the
possession by the latter of an extra atom of oxygen in its molecules.
All the peculiarities and qualities by which hydrogen peroxide is
separated from water are referred to that additional quantum of
oxygen. So the diversity of constitution and appearance of two
brothers, alike in that they have inherited the same internal
secretion trends, may be traced to the superiority of the pituitary of
the one over the other.