The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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Chemists set themselves the task of discovering just what was the
substance possessed of such extraordinary and hitherto unimagined
properties. The pure adrenalin was isolated, capable of evoking all
the reactions of the impure adrenal extract mixtures. The final
triumph was the preparation of it artificially in the laboratory,
its synthesis. When a substance can be synthesized in the chemist's
laboratory, it means that its composition has become thoroughly
understood. Here at last was an example of those mysterious internal
secretions, the existence of which had indeed been postulated and
proven, but which had never actually been inspected by the eye of
mortal man. To have it in a test-tube, indeed to possess it in large
quantities in bottles, to be able to manipulate and examine it without
fear of the co-action of admixed impurities, to see it with the eye,
and to taste it with the tongue, was truly a marvel. The miracle
aroused at once scores of researches.
THE GLAND OF COMBAT AND FIGHT
Considering its effects, one is reminded at once of the similarity
to the expression of a primitive emotion like anger or fear. So, by
turning a relation upside down, it was argued that if artificial
adrenalin could produce all these effects of an emotion like fear, the
emotion itself should produce an increase of the natural adrenalin in
the blood. This was found to be the case. Cannon of Harvard has built
up an entire theory of the adrenal as the gland of emergencies upon
the basis of these effects. In the facing of crises the adrenal
functions as the gland of combat. And indeed, as I have mentioned,
the more combative and pugnacious an animal, the more adrenal it has,
while the timid and meek and weak have less.
The Glands of Combat, the glands of emergency energy, the glands
of preparedness,--such are the adrenal glands when viewed from the
adrenalin standpoint. A picture of its activity in the evolutionary
scheme of struggle and survival is something like the following:
meeting an enemy, the animal is put in danger. It must fight or flee
for its life. In either case, certain conditions must be fulfilled, if
the body of the animal endangered is to be saved. To prevent injury to
itself, and to do as much injury as possible to the foe--that becomes
its immediate urge and necessity. Of the two animals, if in one the
heart should begin to beat more strongly, the blood pressure to rise,
the blood to flow more rapidly through the attacking instruments, the
muscles, the teeth and claws, the brain and its eyes, while the other
animal experiences none of these, the former will be the victor in
fight or flight. Adrenalin may be looked upon as the invention for the
mobilization at a moment's notice, or as we say, after generations of
use, by instinct, of all these visceral and blood advantages in the
struggle of combat or flight.
The nature of instinct, in its relation to the glands of internal
secretion, is a problem for another chapter. But we may note that the
James-Lange theory of an emotion regards it as a consciousness of the
very changes in the organism adrenalin causes. Since adrenalin is the
starter of the whole process, and since McDougal has defined emotion
as the feeling aspect of an instinct, just as an instinct may
be defined as the motor aspect of an emotion, the adrenals as
emotion-genetic, and instinct-genetic, play a part in the most
profound processes of the subconscious and unconscious.
THE MECHANISM OF FEAR
We may therefore visualize a mechanism of fear. An instant excess of
adrenalin occurs in the blood of, say, a cat when it is alarmed by the
sight of a dog. In that cat, at the image of its hereditary enemy,
certain brain cells vibrate. A nerve tract, in use as the line for
that particular message in a hundred thousand generations of cats,
whirrs its yell to the medulla of the adrenal gland. Through the tiny,
solitary veins of the glands, an infinitesimal quantity of the reserve
adrenalin responds. And with what an effect! The blood, that primary
medium of life, the precious fluid that is everything, must all, or
nearly all, be sent to the firing line, the battle trenches, the
brain and muscles, now or never. So the blood is drafted from the
non-essential industries--from the skin where it serves normally to
regulate the heat of the body--from the digestive organs, the stomach
and intestine, which must forsooth stop now, since if the organism
will die, their last effort of digestion has been done--from the liver
and spleen, great chemical factories in normal times, but now of no
moment. Besides, should they be wounded, it is better they should
be bloodless, and so run the least chance of bleeding to death, or
getting infected, for the more tissue there is around, the greater the
danger of infection. So, like the skin, the liver which usually holds
in its great lakes and vessels about a quarter of all the blood in
the body, is almost drained and blanched. At the same time, its great
storehouses of sugar open their sluices and pour into the blood,
increasing its sugar content by about a third because the combustion
of sugar is the easiest way of getting energy free in the cells, sugar
being the most quickly burned up of all the foods, and so the great
food of the muscles and the heart. The poisons of fatigue, acid
products of the contraction of muscles, are antagonized and
neutralized by substances formed in the course of the oxidation of the
sugar. Adrenalin, too, is directly fatigue antagonist. It causes the
blood to clot faster than under ordinary circumstances. It erects the
hair of the animal, and dilates the pupils of the eyes. There is an
increase of the apparent size, all of which are to intimidate the
enemy, like an Indian's painting of his face blue and green. It
also--but what else does it not do?
The story of adrenalin would have delighted the heart of Samuel
Butler. His "Note Books," opulent as they are, would have been the
richer in pages and pages with his comments on it. Contending as he
did with the pompous, dogmatic mechanism worship of the new scientific
clique of his time on the one hand, and the superstitions of the old
theological caste on the other, he had to fight the hardest kind of
guerrilla warfare in defense of the Purpose of Life. Adrenalin, that
weapon of a gland tracing its ancestry back to the begetter of the
brain itself, for brain and adrenal gland both have evolved from the
small nerve ganglia of the invertebrates, would have backed up to the
hilt his argument, which he had to elaborate on the indirect grounds
of analogy and induction. Essential for defense, and for protection,--
an organ in which everything necessary for the stratagems of retreat,
or the offensives of attack, are supplied ad libitum, while everything
non-essential or detrimental to the matter of the moment is inhibited,
arrested and suppressed--no more perfect sample of the design with
which Life is drenched could be imagined by the most closeted of
passionate idealists.
FAILURE OF THE ADRENALS
As the gland of acute stress and strain, the adrenals in modern life
are called upon to function more heavily and frequently than in the
past. As a matter of fact, the life of the beast of jungle and field,
as well as of savage and barbarian, is just as full of emergencies and
shocks as that of the average city man or woman. In the case of the
latter, however, inhibitions, education, and the conditions of modern
living, improper food, sedentary indoor confinement, and universal
rack and noise, have undoubtedly made greater and greater demands upon
the adrenal glands. Chemical quantitative studies have shown that by
repeated stimulation, the adrenal glands may be exhausted of their
reserve supply of secretion, which returns only insufficiently if not
enough time is given for recuperation. There results a condition of
temporary or chronic adrenal insufficiency, supposedly an insufficient
functioning of the gland as a whole. In persons so afflicted there
appears a fatigability, a sensitiveness to cold, cold hands and feet,
which are sometimes mottled bluish-red, a loss of appetite and zest in
life, and a mental instability characterized by an indecision, and a
tendency to worry, a weepishness upon the slightest provocation.
A certain number of the temporary breakdowns or nervous prostrations,
which seem to be growing more common or fashionable, may be sometimes
traced to such a deficiency of normal response to the needs of
everyday conflict by the adrenal gland. In some, mental and physical
elasticity are totally lost, and even the slightest exertion in
either field often causes so much weariness and exhaustion as to be
prohibited. Depression and even melancholia are associated with the
fear of not being able to accomplish good work hitherto easy and
enjoyed. Sometimes they are obsessed with the thought that they have
lost their nerve completely, and so dread to commit themselves in even
the most trivial of situations. The vacillating frame of mind is so
distressing at times as to arouse thoughts of suicide. When these
symptoms concur in the type of personality whom I shall describe
as the unstable adrenal-centered individual, there is evidence for
explaining the process as the effect of an insufficiency of secretion
by the adrenal gland.
Shock, collapse, heart failure and sudden death following abnormal
emotion, like an attack of rage, or the terrors of a railroad
accident, or bad news, or excessive exertion like running a long race
or climbing a high mountain when in poor general health, as the phrase
goes, or in the terminal stages of infections like epidemic influenza
or Asiatic cholera, have been put down to an acute insufficiency of
the adrenal gland. A lowered temperature, blood pressure, and blood
vessel tone, exhibited in tests of the response of the skin to
stroking, are present in all of these and point the same moral.
In the second half of the 19th century, an American physician, Beard,
described Neurasthenia, a general disturbance of the body and mind,
not properly classifiable as a disease, but serious enough to
incapacitate or at least greatly limit the sufferer. The neurasthenic
is to be recognized by the fact that the most painstaking objective
examination of his organs reveals nothing the matter with them. Yet,
according to his complaint, everything is the matter with him. He
cannot sleep when he lies down, he cannot keep awake when he stands
up. He cannot concentrate, but still he is pitifully worried about his
life. The slightest irritant causes him to go off the handle. As
he works himself up into his hysterical state as a reaction to a
disagreeable person or problem, irregular blotches may appear on
his face and neck. Generally, his hands and feet are clammy and
perspiring, his face is abnormally flushed or pallid, the eyes are
worried or starey, unwonted wandering sensations involving now this
area of the body, or now that obsess him. As the blood pressure is
too low for the age, the circulation is nearly always inadequate and
palpitation of the heart is a frequent complaint. So frequent, that
attention is often centered upon the heart, a diagnosis of heart
disease is made, and the unfortunate is doomed for life--to brood
over horrible possibilities. The brooding over themselves and their
troubles is one of the distinctive features of the whole complex.
Neurasthenia may masquerade as any organic disease. An individual with
a soil for a neurasthenic reaction to life will become neurasthenic
when confronted by any stone wall, including a serious ailment within
himself.
Beard's Neurasthenia leaped at once into the limelight. It was seized
upon and applauded in Europe as a good new name for an old condition,
observed particularly in Americans abroad to rest from the fatigues of
the get-rich-quick games of industrial speculators. In fact, the name
of the American Disease was given to it. Various theories about the
effects of climate, sunlight per square inch and unit of time, oxygen
content of the air, and so on, were offered up upon the altar of
scientific explanation. Sir Arbuthnot Lane, famous protagonist of
Lane's intestinal kink, said that all Americans were neurasthenic.
Neurasthenia became one of the most popular of diagnoses, and remains
so today.
Neurasthenia, regarded as a reaction of people to the stress and
strain of life, has without a doubt increased. The most casual of
observers will tell you that the generation of the Great War is a
neurasthenic generation. It takes its pleasures too intensely,
its pains too seriously, its troubles too flippantly. But what is
neurasthenia? Beard himself regarded it as a chronic fatigue and loss
of tone of the nervous system, a literal interpretation of his term.
That the conception, as far as it goes, is valid is proved by the fact
that it is the neurasthenics who furnish the majority of the clientele
of the cults, the Christian Scientists, the osteopaths and the
chiropractors, and who are the subjects of the faith and miracle
cures, like those of Lourdes. That is because their particular
disease, or what appears to them to be their very own disease--and
they certainly cherish their ailments--is but an expression of, a
compensation for, indeed a consolation for, the underlying feelings of
insufficiency or inferiority. Were there no moral code, were there
no social system, nor the consequent inculcated conscience to be
responsible to, there would be no such disguising symptom as
the disease which preoccupies the consciousness. The feeling of
insufficiency would be there, and would be recognized as in itself
the disease. To the physiologist and the psychologist, the feeling of
insufficiency is the disease, no matter how spectacular the overlaying
phenomena--a cripple on crutches or a man blind and speechless. Shell
shock is now acknowledged to belong to this group.
Now one of the outstanding effects of disease of the adrenal glands is
the feelings of muscular and mental inefficiency. And as a matter
of fact, a good number of observations conspire for the idea that a
certain number of neurasthenics are suffering from insufficiency of
the adrenal gland. The chronic state of the acute phenomenon, known as
the nervous breakdown, really represents in them a breakdown of the
reserves of the adrenals, and an elimination of their factor
of safety. In the light of that conception, the great American
disease--dementia americana--is seen to be adrenal disease--and the
American life to be the adrenal life, often making too great demands
upon that life, and so breaking down with it.
ADRENAL EXCESS
The converse of adrenal insufficiency, that of adrenal excess, also
exists. In certain types of the middle-aged, a high blood pressure,
accompanied by a great capacity for work, has been shown to be
associated with hypertrophy of the cortex. In women, there is a
degree of masculinity, as the adrenal in women makes for masculinity,
neutralising more or less the specifically feminine influences of
the internal secretions of the ovary. Such women possess a vigor and
energy above the normal, and command responsible positions in society,
not only among their own sex, but also among men. They are the ones
who, in the present overturn of the traditional sex relationships,
will become the professional politicians, bankers, captains of
industry, and directors of affairs in general.
THE GONADS
(_Sexual, Puberty or Interstitial Glands_)
The gonads is the name applied to the generative or reproductive
glands considered collectively. In the male, they are the testes; in
the female, the ovaries. They are, therefore, sometimes called the
sexual glands. As they possess definite canals for the removal of
their gross secretion, the specific reproductive cells, ova or
spermatozoa, to a surface of the body, they are first of all glands of
external secretion. But they have been also found to hold secretory
cells not concerned with the making of the reproductive corpuscles,
but, as all the evidence indicates, with the manufacture of an
internal secretion. These interstitial cells form the interstitial
gland. A classic example of a gland of internal secretion lodged in
the interstices of a gland of external secretion is thus furnished by
the gonads.
ORIGIN OF SEX TRAITS
The history of sex goes back far in the scheme of life. The
immortality of the ameba was at one time one of the indisputables of
biology. Then some observations were made which threw doubt upon a
long accepted fact, now declared a dogma. Lately, opinion has veered
back to immortality. But in the case of a close relative of the ameba,
the one-celled animal known as the paramecium, union with another
paramecium, true conjugation, has been proved necessary to prevent
death sooner or later. Sex here appears in its most primitive form, on
the basis of exchange of necessary materials, between individuals to
prevent death, their own having been, so to speak, worn out, in the
course of metabolism.
Specifically different sexes come later, when mortality is a universal
fate, as a means of rebirth and escape from death. Then the sexes
develop their latest function, most prominent among the younger
vertebrates, of acting as nature's most potent method of variation and
differentiation. In the pursuit of the different, nature has exalted
sex, and the intensity of the sex life. As far as the preservation of
a species is concerned, and the reproduction of the individual, the
asexual methods, budding, for example, would have done well enough.
But when it comes to enacting a different individual apart from the
effects of environment, sex stands out as the favored method of Life.
The development of the sexes and the sexual life brought a new element
of conflict into the living world. Before the advent of the sexes the
conflict was essentially for the means of existence, food alone. But
with the sexual life came a conflict for sex pleasure, a competition
among members of the same species for the same individual as their sex
partners. The result was the introduction of a factor in evolution
which Darwin examined so closely in the "Descent of Man."
The sex conflict has been the cause for the origin and the survival
of certain physical and mental traits, helpful in sex attraction, sex
combat, the growth of the embryo, and the nutrition and safety of the
young of a species,--in short, the whole process of sexual selection.
The proportions of the skeleton, the distribution of hair and fat, the
construction of organs of attack and defense, the color of the skin,
the cyclic processes of preparation for impregnation, the oestrus or
heat period in animals, the menstrual period in the human being, the
psychic reactions to danger and combat have all been thus determined.
That man is bearded while woman is not,--that woman has potentially
functional breasts while man has not,--the aggressive pugnacity of
man contrasted with the more passive timidity of woman, have all been
evolved in the sex struggle, surviving because most effective in that
struggle. These so-called secondary sexual characteristics are an
expression of the influence of the internal secretion of the gonads,
or the interstitial glands. Some call them puberty glands, because
their ripening initiates puberty.
We know that these interstitial glands, to stick to that name, (rather
than to the name of the puberty glands, since they serve not only
to induce puberty but to maintain maturity) are the actual primary
dictators of the process by which male and female are distinguished,
if not created. Castration was probably the first surgical operation
carried out for experimental purposes, suggested no doubt by a
curiosity concerning its effects. Trepanning of the skull, the
geologic record indicates, was done even by the cave man. But as an
experimental operation, castration seems to hold the primary position
in the annals of surgery.
Its effects noted, the satisfaction of one of the lower human
instincts, jealousy, popularised it. From the days of Semiramis,
eunuchs have been commonplace figures of the East, their function
definite: to guard the harems of the powerful. The age of Abdul Hamid
witnessed no diminution of the barbaric tortures by which children are
prepared for the profession. It is to the credit of England that in
its dominions in the Orient the practice has been abolished. But it
goes on even today. According to the best authorities, four out of
five of these victims at the auto-da-fe of a vicious human instinct
die immediately or soon after from exhaustion due to pain and
infection. Not all of the ancient nations countenanced the brutal
horror. The Hebrews placarded castration an unpardonable sin, making
it a sin to castrate even animals. Nor was any man so mutilated
permitted to worship in the house of the Lord (Deuteronomy xxiii, 11).
Yet we have evidence that the latter Jewish kings employed foreign
eunuchs in their harems, who often held the most important positions
as ministers of the court.
Besides the eunuchs, another group of people have presented material
for the study of the interstitial glands. These are the Skoptzi of
Russia and the Lipowaner of Roumania. Among them castration is a
religious ritual. Mankind has always been most brutal to itself in the
name of the ideal. These sects were founded because in the eighteenth
century an antipode of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young discovered this
passage in Matthew xix, 12.
"For there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother's
womb, and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men: and
there be eunuchs _which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom
of heaven's sake_. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."
He decided that he was inspired to spread the gospel of castration. A
sect was founded who thought that surgery was the easiest way to enter
the gates of Paradise, and they multiplied and fructified. The sect
exists today, and some of the most interesting studies of the internal
secretion of the interstitial glands have been made among them.
Related to acquired eunuchism is the condition of eunuchoidism, the
eunuchs which were so born from their mother's womb. Baron Larey, the
great surgeon of Napoleon's armies, was their first painter. He was
the only altruist Bonaparte said he had ever met in his life. He
portrayed a group of soldiers with peculiarly high-pitched voices,
smooth and hairless skins, and atrophied generative organs. A somewhat
similar picture is evolved in certain types of insufficiency of
the pituitary gland. Features of the picture are exhibited with
disturbances of the other internal secretory glands also, like the
thymus.
But a host of experiments and data prove the interstitial glands to be
the direct controllers of elementary sexuality and the specific sex
traits of male and female. Beginning with Berthold back in the first
half of the nineteenth century, who studied the fowl, a number of
observations have been made on the effects of excision, translocation
and transplantation of these glands.
The results of the experiments and observations can be summed up as
follows: if the male individual is castrated before puberty, that is,
before the advent of the sexual life, secondary sex qualities do not
develop. In males, the generative organs do not grow, hair on the face
does not appear, hair elsewhere on the body remains generally scanty,
the voice continues as high-pitched as the child's, there is more
or less muscle weakness, obesity, and mental sluggishness. In other
words, we have an effeminate man, technically a eunuch. In the
castrated female, the pelvis does not grow to the normal feminine
size, the breasts do not swell as they should, more or less hair comes
out on the face, the voice is low-pitched, and tends to be rather
husky, the legs are longer, and again, the mentality is dulled. That
is, a masculine sort of woman is produced.
In short, the castrated male takes on a feminine type, and the
castrated female, a male type. In either case there is also an
infantilism, a retention of the infantile mental traits, a lack of
development of the adult mental attitudes and reactions. Now, if
in the castrated male is transplanted an ovary, the positive
characteristics of the female are evoked, such as enlarged mammary
glands, and a tendency to secretion of milk. Experiments have also
been reported in which a uterus was also placed in such an animal,
with a means of entry, and pregnancy followed. If in the castrated
female a testicle is planted, the masculine traits become much more
marked and striking. A direct exchange of the male and female
roles can thus be achieved. Castration after puberty cannot modify
profoundly structures like the skeleton which are already completed.
Yet it may unquestionably bring about definite retrogressive changes
in the secondary sex characters: reduction or loss of virility,
diminution of facial and body hair, and a general presenility or
hastening of senility.