The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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WAY FOR THE PHYSIOLOGIST
There has grown up, contemporaneously with the teachings of Freud,
a body of discoveries and knowledge in physiology, concerning
these factors, which is like a long sword of light illuminating a
pitch-black spot in the night. The dark places in human nature seem to
have become the sole monopoly of the Freudians and their psychology.
But only seemingly. For all this time the physiologist has been
working. Beginning with a candle and now holding in his hands the most
powerful arc-lights, he has explored two regions, the sympathetic
nervous system and the glands of internal secretion, and has come upon
data which in due course will render a good many of the Freudian
dicta obsolete. Not that the Freudian fundamentals will be scrapped
completely. But they will have to fit into the great synthesis which
must form the basis of any control of the future of human nature. That
future belongs to the physiologist. Already his achievements provide
the foundations. I propose in the following chapters to sketch the
history and outline the elements of this new knowledge, and then to
glimpse some of the larger human reactions to it. A good deal of this
new knowledge is not altogether new. A number of the isolated facts
have been known and talked about for more than two generations. But
the newer additions, and the light they have thrown upon old problems
present the opportunity for a synthesis, which must sooner or later be
made.
THE CHEMISTRY OF THE SOUL
Besides, it is time that the secrets of the laboratories stepped out
into the market place, unashamed. Imaginative man has played for ages
immemorial with wondrous fairy tales and fancies of what he would
achieve. The sciences of physics and chemistry have made everyday
commonplace realities out of his radiant dreams. One need not repeat
the cliches of our editors. But the analogy is there nevertheless. No
control over heat and light and electricity, today our slaves, was
possible until physics and chemistry took them in hand. No control of
the human soul is possible until it too will be taken in hand by them.
We may now look forward to a real future for mankind because we have
before us the beginnings of a chemistry of human nature. The internal
secretions, with their influence upon brain and nervous system as
well as every other part of the body corporation, as essentially
blood-circulating chemical substances, have been discovered the real
governors and arbiters of instincts and dispositions, emotions and
reactions, characters and temperaments, good and bad. A huge complex
of evidence, as various, complicated and obscure as human nature
itself, supports that fundamental law.
The chemistry of the soul! Magnificent phrase! It's a long, long way
to that goal. The exact formula is as yet far beyond our reach. But we
have started upon the long journey and we shall get there. Then will
Man truly become the experimental animal of the future, experimenting
not only with the external conditions of his life, but with the
constituents of his very nature and soul. The chemical conditions of
his being, including the internal secretions, are the steps of the
ladder by which he will climb to those dizzy heights where he will
stretch out his hands and find himself a God. Modern knowledge of
these chemical substances, circulating in the blood, and affecting
every cell of the body, dates back scarce half a century. But already
the paths blazed by the pioneers have led to the exploration of great
countries. The thyroid gland, the pituitary gland, the adrenal glands,
the thymus, the pineal, the sex glands, have yielded secrets. And
certain great postulates have been established. The life of every
individual, normal or abnormal, his physical appearance, and his
psychic traits, are dominated largely by his internal secretions. All
normal as well as abnormal individuals are classifiable according to
the internal secretions which rule in their make-up. Individuals,
families, nations and races show definite internal secretion traits,
which stamp them with the quality of difference. The internal
secretion formula of an individual may, in the future, constitute his
measurement which will place him accurately in the social system.
"More and more we are forced to realize that the general form and
external appearance of the human body depends, to a large extent,
upon the functioning, during the early developmental period, of the
endocrine glands. Our stature, the kinds of faces we have, the
length of our arms and legs, the shape of the pelvis, the color and
consistency of the integument, the quantity and regional location
of our subcutaneous fat, the amount and distribution of hair on our
bodies, the tonicity of our muscles, the sound of the voice, and
the size of the larynx, the emotions to which our exterior gives
expression. All are to a certain extent conditioned by the
productivity of our glands of internal secretion." (Llewellys F.
Barker, Johns Hopkins University, 1st President of Association for
Study of Internal Secretions.)
The implications for the statesman, the educator, the vocational
expert, the student of the neurotic and of genius, of delinquents,
deficients and criminals, the explorers of the exceptional and the
commonplace, the understanding of the poetic and kinetic, base and
dull types, as well as of those two master interests of mankind, Sex
and War, are manifest. The mystery of the individual, in all his
distinct uniqueness, begins to be penetrated. And so every phase
of social life, in which the individual is at bottom the final
determinant, must be reviewed in the light of the new knowledge.
History may be examined from an entirely new angle. The biographies
of our Heroes of the Past, in the Carlylean sense, will bear
reinspection. Even Utopias will have to be revised.
The internal secretions constitute and determine much of the inherited
powers of the individual and their development They control physical
and mental growth and all the metabolic processes of fundamental
importance. They dominate all the vital functions during the three
cycles of life. They co-operate in an intimate relationship which may
be compared to an interlocking directorate. A derangement of their
function, causing an insufficiency of them, an excess, or an
abnormality, upsets the entire equilibrium of the body, with
transforming effects upon the mind and the organs. In short, they
control human nature, and whoever controls them, controls human
nature.
The control of the glands of internal secretion waits upon our
knowledge of them, the nature and precise composition of the
substances manufactured by them, and just what they do to the cells.
Envisaging the future, that knowledge today is meagre. Looking back
fifty years, it becomes an amazing achievement and revelation. It is
worth our while to survey the accomplished, and to trace its general
human significance. For a certain tangible degree of knowledge and
control has been attained and should be part of the average citizen's
equipment in dealing with the everyday problems of his life.
THE ATTITUDE OF THE LABORATORY
A certain number of so-called experimental physiologists, that is,
the physiologists of the animal laboratory, who will have nothing but
syllogistic deductions and quantitative determinations based upon
animal experiments as the data of their science, will be apt to look
askance upon the preceding paragraphs, and those which will follow. To
them, any man who relates the internal secretions to anything, outside
of the routineer's paths, puts his reputation at stake, if he has
any reputation at all to start in with. They would have us deliver
a Scotch verdict upon all the questions which arise as soon as one
attempts to take in the more general significance of the glands of
internal secretion. This, even though the more general implications
concerning the effects of their products, the relations of them to
growth and development, nutrition and energy, environmental
reactions and resistance to disease, as well as the grand complex of
intelligence, are admittedly well ascertained in some directions.
The method of absolute measurement in science has yielded miracles.
For some thousands of years, an isolated individual, here and there
or an isolated institution have devoted themselves to the task,
struggling not only with their own weaknesses, but with religious and
political dogmas which spoiled and vitiated even the beginnings of
their efforts. When, in the seventeenth century, men associated
themselves in research, for free communication and discussion of their
findings, a great invention came alive. Close on its heels was born
the exact experimental method. Amazing triumphs were born of that
marriage which swept away before it ignorance and superstition and
prejudice. Its children and grandchildren have flourished and grown
strong and mighty. They have transmuted the material conditions of
life. Certainly all the laurels belong to the method of absolute,
measured observations.
Yet all this time the old method of inductive observation has not gone
dead. Most magnificent triumph of nineteenth century science, the
evolution theory of Charles Darwin, remains the most conspicuous
instance of clarification of thought in human history. That work was
the outcome of an attempt to relate and interpret a collection of
observations on species and their variations, that had long lain to
hand, a mixture without a solvent. Darwin saw certain generalizations
as solvents, and behold! a clear solution out of the mud. But it was
by piling evidence upon evidence, co-ordinating isolated facts not
directly associated, that the towering structure was erected. There is
no prettier sample extant of the powers of the inductive method.
Not that there are no triumphs of the quantitative method in store for
the biologist. Already, the materials of the Mendelians have become
basic parts of his structure. And today, in pursuit of the solutions
of hundreds of the problems of living matter, chemists and
physiologists are employing the most precise standards, units, and
measures of the physical sciences. Blood chemistry of our time is a
marvel, undreamed of a generation ago. Also, these achievements are
a perfect example of the accomplished fact contradicting a priori
prediction and criticism. For it was one of the accepted dogmas of the
nineteenth century that the phenomena of the living could never be
subjected to accurate quantitative analysis.
However desirable the purely quantitative experimental methods may be,
they naturally need always to be preceded by the qualitative studies
of direct observations. Inevitably there will be numberless errors,
apparent and real inconsistencies and contradictions, and ideas that
will have to be discarded. Just the same there is no other method of
progress. Every bit of evidence points towards the internal secretions
as the holders of the secrets of our inmost being. They are the well
springs of life, the dynamos of the organism. In trailing their scent
we appear to be upon the track not only of the chemistry of our
bodies, but of the chemistry of our very souls. An increasing host of
factors and studies marshal themselves solidly for that declaration.
Endeavor to conceive the consequences and possibilities for the
future. A synthesis of the known in the field provides even now a
means of understanding and control of the perplexities of human nature
and life that are like a vista seen from a mountain top after the
lifting of a fog.
The most precious bit of knowledge we possess today about Man is that
he is the creature of his glands of internal secretion. That is, Man
as a distinctive organism is the product, the by-product, of a number
of cell factories which control the parts of his make-up. Much as the
different divisions of an automobile concern produce the different
parts of a car. These chemical factories consist of cells, manufacture
special substances, which act upon the other cells of the body and so
start and determine the countless processes we call Life. Life, body
and soul emerge from the activities of the magic ooze of their silent
chemistry precisely as a tree of tin crystals arises from the chemical
reactions started in a solution of tin salts by an electric current.
Man is regulated by his Glands of Internal Secretion. At the beginning
of the third decade of the twentieth century, after he had struggled,
for we know at least fifty thousand years, to define and know himself,
that summary may be accepted as the truth about himself. It is
a far-reaching induction, but a valid induction, supported by a
multitude of detailed facts.
Amazingly enough, the incontestable evidence, that first pointed to,
and then proved up to the hilt, this answer to the question: What is
Man? has been gathered in less than the last fifty years. Darwin and
Huxley, and Spencer, who first opened men's eyes to their origins,
were ignorant of the very existence of some of them, and had not the
faintest notion or suspicion of the real importance or function of any
of them.
THE PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS
Now, there are certain prejudices and problems which appear to be
rudely brushed away by the dogmatic arrogance of the principle stated.
What, you say, is Man but an affair of his peculiar gland chemistry?
But what of mind, soul, consciousness? Still another of these
pathetically one-sided and superficial theories of man as a machine
pure and simple which would make him the most complicated of
mechanisms, a marvel of intricate parts, but would deprive him of his
essence as self-conscious unique in the universe. Man, thinking man,
at any rate, dreads to lose the cherished impregnable conviction that
he is something apart, inherently, and therefore infinitely different
from every other phenomenon in the range of his cosmos.
A thorough dissection of the relation and attitude toward psychic
material of the consistent physiologist, who refuses to deal in
contradictory terms, would lead us a little too far. So would the
reconciliation between the claims of mind and the concept of the
organism as a system of chemical reactions. The most fundamental
aspects of that herculean task, warned by the sign, No Trespassing,
we shall leave to the metaphysicians. The influence of the glands of
internal secretion upon the mind we must consider, but at present
postpone. Yet the hot-headed contenders on both sides may be reminded
of certain facts.
We live in the most iconoclastic of ages. There are sane people alive
today going quietly about their business who deny the very existence
of consciousness. These heretics of course pooh-pooh absolutely the
lions of metaphysics. On the other hand, it may be pointed out to our
mechanists who believe in mechanism to the bitter end, that even if
man can be described entirely as a mere transformer of energy, there
is no reason why he cannot also be described as a transformer of
energy plus someone who makes use of the transformer and of the
energy transformed. The stone wall before the honest mechanist is the
abolition of purpose, and design, an old insoluble problem upon
his premises. Preach, until you are blue in the face, behaviorist
tropisms, in which man is pushed and pulled about in his environment
as are iron filings in a magnetic field. Think up objective
physiologies in which your life and mine become a series of
concatenated influences and compound reflexes. Play with words like
the concentration reflex when you mean idea, and the symbolic reflex
when you mean language. But your most rigid nomenclature will never
abolish the mystic personal purpose in the equation, no matter how low
the step in the animal series to which you descend. The declaration
that a man is dominated by certain glands within his body should not
be taken to give aid and comfort to those who would banish mind from
the universe.
CHAPTER I
HOW THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION WERE DISCOVERED
Just what are the glands of internal secretion? And how have we become
possessed of whatever information about them we have? A brief review
of how the idea of a gland of internal secretion came into the human
mind and of the contributions that have converged into a single body
of knowledge is worth while.
A gland is a collection of cells (those viscous globules which are the
units of all tissues and organs). It manufactures substances intended
for a particular effect upon the body economy. The effect may be
either local or upon the body as a whole.
Originally, a gland meant something in the body which was seen to make
something else, generally a juice or a liquid mixture of some sort.
A classical example is the salivary glands elaborating saliva. The
microscope has shown us that every gland is a chemical factory in
which the cells are the workers. The product of the gland work is its
secretion. Thus the sweat glands of the skin secrete the perspiration
as their secretion, the lachrymal glands of the eyes the tears as
theirs. The collectivism of management and control is the only
essential difference between them and the modern soap factory or
T.N.T. plant.
Man as a carnivor, and as a consequent anatomist, has been acquainted
with these more superficially placed glands for some thousands of
years. During all this time and during the epoch of the achievements
of gross anatomy, it was believed that the secretions of all glands
were poured out upon some surface of the body. Either an exterior
surface like the skin, or some interior surface, the various mucous
membranes. This was supported by the discovery of canal-like passage
ways leading from the gland to the particular surface where its
secretion was to act. These corridors, the secretory or excretory
ducts, are present, for example, in the liver, conducting the bile
to the small intestine. Devices of transportation fit happily into
a comparison of a gland to a chemical factory, corresponding thus
closely to the tramways and railroads of our industrial centers.
Little more than a hundred years ago, it was observed that certain
organs, like the thyroid body in the neck, and the adrenal capsules in
the abdomen, hitherto neglected because their function was hopelessly
obscure, had a glandular structure. As in so much scientific advance,
the discovery or improvement of a new instrument or method, a fresh
tool of research, was responsible. The perfection of the microscope
was the reason this time.
If one wishes to trace the idea of internal secretion by cells to an
individual, it is convenient, if not pedantic, to give the credit to
Theophile de Bordeu, a famous physician of Paris in the eighteenth
century. Bordeu came to Paris as a brilliant provincial in his early
twenties and by the charm of his manner and daring therapy fought
his way to the most exclusive aristocratic practice of the court.
Naturally a courtier, taking to the intrigues of the royal court like
a duck to water, making enemies on every hand as well as friends, and
with a fastidious and impatient clientele, he yet found time to dabble
in the wonders of the newly perfected microscope and to speculate upon
the meaning of the novelties revealed by it in the tissues. _He coined
the thought of a gland secretion into the blood_.
It was in the year 1749 that he came to Paris from the Pyrenees,
a young medical graduate, destined to become the most fashionable
practitioner of his time. At the age of twenty-three he was holding
the professorship of anatomy at his alma mater, Montpelier, where
his father was a successful physician. At twenty-five he was elected
corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. A handsome
presence and a Tartarin de Tarascon disposition assured his success
from the start. The medical world was then composed of the emulsion of
charlatanry and science Moliere ridiculed. Success stimulated envy and
jealousy. One of the richest of the older medical men set himself the
job of procuring his scalp. On a trumped-up charge of stealing jewels
from a dead patient--a favorite accusation against the doctors of the
eighteenth century--he had Bordeu's license taken away from him. The
good graces of certain women to whom Bordeu had always appealed, and
who indeed supplied the funds to get him started in Paris, rammed
through two acts of Parliament to reinstate him. Nothing daunted, he
returned to his quest for a court clientele, and was rewarded finally
by having the moribund Louis XV as a patient.
This was the man with whom the modern history of the internal
secretions begins. Not content with adventures among the courtiers and
desperadoes of the most corrupt court in the most corrupt city of the
world, he went in for research. The high power microscope that came
into vogue when he was studying, revealed vague wonders which he
described in a monograph, "Researches into the mucous tissues or
cellular organs." But what makes him interesting is a slender volume
on the "Medical Analysis of the Blood," published in the year of the
American Declaration of Independence. The sexual side of men and women
aroused Bordeu's most ardent enthusiasms. Starting with observations
on the characters of eunuchs and capons, as well as spayed female
animals, he formulated a conception of sexual secretions absorbed
into the blood, settling the male or female tint of the organism and
setting the seal upon the destiny of the individual. Thus he must be
donated the credit of anticipating the most modern doctrine on the
subject.
The generation after him witnessed the triumph of the cell as the
recognized unit of structure of the tissues, the brick of the organs.
It was soon found that the cells of the more familiar glands, like
the sweat or tear glands, resembled the cells of the more mysterious
structures named the thyroid in the neck, or adrenal in the abdomen,
of which the function was unknown. What had hitherto prevented
classification of the latter as glands was the fact that they
possessed no visible pathways for the removal of their secretion. So
now they were set apart as the _ductless_ glands, the glands without
ducts, as contrasted with the glands normally equipped with ducts.
Since, too, they were observed to have an exceedingly rich supply of
blood, the blood presented itself as the only conceivable mode of
egress for the secretions packed within the cells. So they were also
called the blood or vascular glands.
The names which became most popular were those which represented a
contrast of the glands with the ducts, conveying their secretion to
the exterior, as the glands of EXTERNAL SECRETION and the glands
without the ducts, the secretions of which were kept within the body,
absorbed by the blood and lymph to be used by the other cells, as
the glands of INTERNAL SECRETION. How different these two classes
of glands are may be realized by imagining the existence of great
factories manufacturing food products, which would diffuse through
their walls into the atmosphere, to be absorbed by our bodies.
There are certain terms for the glands of internal secretion which
are used interchangeably. They are spoken of often as the _endocrine_
glands and as the _hormone_ producing glands. Endocrine is most
convenient for it stands for both the gland and its secretion. Hormone
is employed a good deal in the literature of the subject. But it
applies specifically to the internal secretion, and not to the gland.
THE EXPERIMENTAL PIONEER
All this clarification of the concept of the glands of internal
secretion occurred in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
However, no inkling of their real importance to the body, of which
quantitatively they form so insignificant a part, was apparently
revealed to anyone. Not even the most daring speculation or brilliant
guess work in physiology engaged them as material. Thus Henle, the
great anatomist, calmly affirmed that these glands "have no influence
on animal life: they may be extirpated or they degenerate without
sensation or motion suffering in the least." Johann Mueller, the most
celebrated physiologist of his day and contemporary of Henle, wrote
in 1844 and coolly stated, "The ductless glands are alike in one
particular--they either produce a different change in the blood which
circulates through them or the lymph which they elaborate plays a
special role in the formation of blood or of chyle." In other words,
they were dismissed as curious nonentities, of no real significance
to the running of the body. Laennec, the French founder of the Art of
Diagnosis in Medicine, once said that nothing about a science is more
interesting than the progress of that science itself. He might have
added that nothing either was more interesting than the contradictions
in that progress. For while these grand moguls of their sciences were
enunciating their dogmas, pioneers here and there were already setting
the mines that were to explode them.
The experimental method, to the value of which biologists were
just beginning to awaken, was destined to be the vehicle of Time's
revenges. An application of it to the mysteries of sex was the
immediate occasion. Sex and sex differences have always more or less
obsessed the imagination of mankind. The volumes of theories about
them would constitute a respectable museum. Certain gross facts,
however, were known. The effects of loss of the sex glands upon the
configuration of the body and the predominating constitution in
animals and eunuchs have always attracted attention. The proverbs and
stories of all nations are full of references to them. But up to the
nineteenth century no controlled experimental work was ever carried
out regarding them. It was in 1849, that A.A. Berthold of Goettingen, a
quiet, sedate lecturer, carried out the pioneer experiment of removing
the testes of four roosters and transplanting them under the skin. It
was Berthold's idea to test whether a gland with a definite external
secretion, and a duct through which that secretion was expelled,
but which yet had powers over the body as a whole that were to be
attributed only to an internal secretion, could not be shown, by
a clean-cut experiment, to possess such an internal secretion. He
succeeded perfectly. For he found that, though, in thus separating the
gland from its duct and so cutting off its external secretion, the
action of the cells manufacturing that secretion was destroyed, the
general effects upon the body were not those of castration. The
animals retained their male characteristics as regards voice,
reproductive instinct, fighting spirit and growth of comb and wattles.
Whereas if the glands were entirely removed, these male traits,
peculiar to the rooster, were completely lost. The inference was the
existence of an internal secretion.