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THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY
A STUDY OF THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION IN RELATION TO THE TYPES
OF HUMAN NATURE
BY LOUIS BERMAN, M.D.
ASSOCIATE IN BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
1922
The passage from the miracles of nature to those of art is easy.
--Francis Bacon, _Novum Organum_, 1620.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE
I. HOW THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION WERE DISCOVERED
II. THE GLANDS: THYROID AND PITUITARY
III. THE ADRENAL GLANDS, GONADS, AND THYMUS
IV. THE GLANDS AS AN INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATE
V. HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE NORMAL BODY
VI. THE MECHANICS OF THE MASCULINE AND FEMININE
VII. THE RHYTHMS OF SEX
VIII. HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND
IX. THE BACKGROUNDS OF PERSONALITY
X. THE TYPES OF PERSONALITY
XI. SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES
XII. APPLICATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES
XIII. THE EFFECT UPON HUMAN EVOLUTION
THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY
INTRODUCTION
ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE
THE CASE AGAINST HUMAN NATURE
Man, know thyself, said the old Greek philosopher. Man perforce has
taken that advice to heart. His life-long interest is his own species.
In the cradle he begins to collect observations on the nature of
the queer beings about him. As he grows, the research continues,
amplifies, broadens. Wisdom he measures by the devastating accuracy
of the data he accumulates. When he declares he knows human nature,
consciously cynical maturity speaks. Doctor of human nature--every
man feels himself entitled to that degree from the university
of disillusioning experience. In defense of his claim, only the
limitations of his articulate faculty will curb the vehemence of his
indictment of his fellows.
For all history provides the material, literature the critique,
biology the inexorable logic of the case against human nature. The
historical record is a spectacle of man destroying man, a collection
of chapters on man's increasing cruelty to man. Limitations of time
and space have been shortened and eliminated. Tools of production have
been multiplied and complicated. The sources of energy and power have
been systematically attacked and trapped. But the nature of man has
remained so unchanged that clap trap about progress is easy target for
the barrage of every cheap pamphleteer.
The naturalist probes into codes of conduct, systems of morality,
structures of societies, variations in the scales of value that
individuals, races and nations have subjected themselves to as custom,
law and religion. Again and again the portrait is presented of
man preying upon man, of cunning a parasite upon stupidity and of
predatory strength enslaving the weakling intellect. Until finally are
evoked reactions and consequences that overtake in catastrophe and
cataclysm preyer and preyed upon alike.
Human nature is but part of the magnificent tree of beast nature. Man
is linked by every tie of blood and bone and cell memories with his
brethren of the sea, the jungle, the forest and the fields. The beast
is a seeker of freedom, but a seeker for his own ego alone, and the
satisfaction of his own instincts only. Thus he struggles to a sort of
freedom which makes him the Ishmael of the Universe, everyone's hand
against him, as his own hand is against everyone. The human animal has
achieved no advance beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed
himself from his bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes.
And so the sociologist, the analyst of human associations, turns out
to be simply the historian and accountant of slaveries.
Yet the history of mankind is, too, a long research into the nature
of the machinery of freedom. All recorded history, indeed, is but
the documentation of that research. Viewed thus, customs, laws,
institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor, systems
of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized,
established until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more
perfect means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom
to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life,
vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid, gorilla, as well
as of man is the history of a searching for freedom.
Freedom! What to a living creature is freedom? How completely has it
dominated the life history of every creature that ever crawled upon
the earth? Trace our cellular pedigree, descend our family tree to its
rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the craving for more freedom is
manifest in the soul of even the lowest, buried in darkness and slime.
When the first clever bit of colloidal ooze, protoplasm as the ameba,
protruded a bit of itself as a pseudopod, it achieved a new freedom.
For, accidentally or deliberately, it created for itself a new
power--the ability to go directly for food in its environment, instead
of waiting, patiently, passively, as the plant does, for food to just
happen along. Therewith developed in place of the previous quietist
pacifist, quaker attitude toward its surroundings, a new religion, a
new tone: aggressive, predatory, careerist.
That adventure was a great step forward for the ameba--a miracle that
freed it forever from the danger of death by starvation. But latent
in that move were all the terrible possibilities of the tiger, the
alligator, the wolf and all the varieties of predaceous beast and
plant, parasitism and slavery. The device that enabled the ameba to
change its position in space of its own will, and so increased its
freedom immeasureably, meant the generation of infinite evil, pain,
suffering and degradation for billions in the womb of time.
THE BREEDING OF INFERIORITY
Human history, being a continuation of vertebrate history, is full of
similar instances. The invention of the stock company, for example,
furnished a certain relative freedom to hundreds, a certain amount of
leisure to think and play, and independence to travel and record, and
immunity from a daily routine and drudgery. In turn, it bore fruit in
miseries and horrors multiplied for millions, like those of the child
lacemakers of Mid-Victorian England, who were dragged from their beds
at two or three o'clock in the morning to work until ten or eleven at
night in the services of a stock company.
A corporation is said to have no soul. The struggle for freedom of
every living thing has no conscience. Throughout the living world,
from ameba to man, parasitism and slavery together with their
by-products, physical and spiritual degeneracy, appear as the after
effects of the more vital individual's efforts to remain alive and
free. The origins of slavery may be seen in the parasitisms of the
infectious diseases which kill man. The change from parasitism to
slavery was an inevitable step of creative intelligence. In the
transition evolution made one of those breaks which it indulges in
periodically as its mode of progress.
The natural effect of slavery has been a selection of two sorts of
individuals along the lines of the survival of the adapted. It has
tended to perpetuate in the breed the qualities of the strong which
would make them stronger, and certain qualities in the weak which
would increase their weakness. For parasitism and likewise slavery
infallibly entail the degradation of certain structures and an
overgrowth of others by the law of use and disuse. The type of organ
which would function normally, were not its possessor parasitic in
that function, invariably degenerates or disappears. Parasitic insects
lose their wings. An entire anatomical system may even be lost. So the
tapeworm, which feeds upon the digested food present in the intestines
of its host, has no alimentary canal of its own because it needs none.
On the other hand, the organs of attack and combat grow by a constant
use into the most remarkable of efficient weapons.
In human society the process continues. Out of the tapeworm nature,
the tiger nature, the wolf nature, the simian nature, human nature
evolves. Repeated episodes of subjugation and suppression mixed with
countless incidents of predaceous cupidity and rapacity have made
Man what he is today. Indeed, by a sort of instinct, society has
constructed its institutions upon empirical observations and
assumptions agreeing with this principle. The deductions concerning
human nature and human traits that an interplanetary visitor would
draw from a study of our common law would be at least slightly
humiliating to our incorrigible pride. Law courts, codes of civil
contract and criminal procedure, the systems of subordination in
armies and navies, castes and classes, men and women, employers and
employees, teachers and pupils, parents and children, are based upon
the fundamental, the conservative axiom that man, especially the
common plain man (Lincoln's phrase), is a being incurably lazy,
stupid, dishonest, muddled, cowardly, greedy, restless, obsessed with
a low cunning and a selfish callousness and insensibility to the
sufferings of his fellow creatures, animal and human.
Why is it that Man, the noblest creature of creation, made in the
image of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a
Christ, a Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so
described, not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and
Mark Twain, but by the common law, the common opinion, the common
assumptions of mankind? Because the development of slavery and
parasitism in human society, the subjection of the weak to the strong,
the dull and base to the clever and headstrong, set up a vicious
cycle: the liberation of more energy for the making of more and
more slaves and the propagation of slaves and slave qualities in a
geometrically increasing proportion.
This might be called the _Malthusian law of slavery_. For the
qualities that I have named as man's own characterization of himself
are the qualities of the slave and the slave-soul. Nietzche took great
pains to repeat ad nauseam that these qualities were the qualities of
the slave. But by burdening himself with the hypothesis, evolved from
his inner consciousness, that the slaves imposed from below a morality
of weakness upon their masters, he missed the really obvious process
by which slaves beget more slaves, slavery begets more slavery, and
the slave-soul becomes universal. That process is the simple action
of physical and spiritual reproduction of the slaves. The subnormal
begets the subnormal, the inferior begets the inferior.
Slavery appeared as an invention of the would-be-free. It was a
brilliant flash of genius of a seeker after freedom. However, it
became a boomerang. By multiplication and hereditary transmission, the
inferiority and the number of the slaves created a new overwhelming
problem for the superior few, the upper crust of the free. At last the
problem grew into the problem of problems, the problem of government,
that threatened all freedom, as an epidemic disease threatens even
the most healthy. Government, at first organized for conquest and
subjugation, had to change its character until it became more and more
to consist of experiments in a new social machinery that would free
somebody of the incubus. So through the centuries, one technique of
liberty after another was tested in the laboratory of experience.
But always the attempts are so muddled, because the problem is not
grasped. Muddledom is the essence of the slave-soul. And the
essence infiltrates and poisons the whole atmosphere in which the
would-be-free think and act. Kings' heads are chopped off, a whole
class is guillotined, reform movements come and go, the masters fight
every inch of their retreat, and pile stratagem upon stratagem, device
upon device, to retain their spoils.
The democratic formula of freedom for all comes to the fore. So at
last universal suffrage is introduced as the panacea. Freedom seems
within grasp. Now it looks as if a method and an objective have been
hit upon, that will lead both the free and the enslaved out of their
mutual bondage, and release the handcuffs which have bound them
together. All the trial and error tests to which history had subjected
institutions appeared to culminate in the formula that would
automatically yield Liberty. The French wanted a little more and added
Equality and Fraternity. The Americans put it quite definitely as the
formula that would assist the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness.
That formula is: the _democracy of the normals_.
To be sure, a civilization might be organized for the breeding and the
glorification of the supernormals. Such a civilization may yet have to
be tried. But as the supernormals, as we know them today, are merely
biologic sports, in a sense, simple accidents, no one can tell whether
they will turn out true shots or just flashes in the pan. So it looks
the better course to stick to the plan of nature, which seems to be
the raising of the level of the normals, and the gradual increase of
their faculties and powers.
WHAT THE STATESMAN IS UP AGAINST
Under the terms of the democratic formula the problems of the
statesman seem to become enormously simplified. That is, if one
assumes that he has worked out a perfectly clear idea of what
a democracy means and what the normal means. Assuming these
unassumables, his problem simplifies into the definite object of
producing and developing the greatest possible number of normals--or
if you will, the greatest happiness of the greatest number of normal
lives.
Furthermore you then begin to have the entirely novel possibility in
the world: some sort of collective effort for a collective purpose,
beyond the personal greeds and fears, factions and hatreds. So the
state, instead of fulfilling its old function of serving as the tool
of certain powerful individuals, latterly known as the Big Men, might
be transformed into an instrument toward freedom. With the ideal of a
democracy of the normals ever before him, the statesman could go on
to construct and modify his social machinery. That would entail the
satisfaction not alone of the animal needs, but also the highest
aspirations and therefore the provision of the finest conditions of
life for the normal: those most favorable, stimulative, and assistant
to creative activity. For what else is the content of the idea of
freedom?
Without committing the intellectual sin which William James named
Vicious Abstractionism, the goal of the clearest progressive and
liberal thought and forces of the twentieth century might be summed
up as this freedom in a democracy of normals. A good formula which
coincides with the technique of nature in the evolution of species.
A fair fight, a free-for-all who are unhandicapped, is the motto
of natural selection. Where civilization shakes hands with natural
instinct, what but the happiest of results can be expected?
Unfortunately, the formula in human society possesses an Achilles'
heel. Again it is slavery. Where slavery has become bred into the
bone, the standard of the normal becomes reduced so tremendously that
the average of normals, the majority, are hopelessly inferior. In
effect, they are really subnormal. So the ideal of our ideal statesman
is bound to be defeated because of the inadequacy of his material.
No matter how interested in his main business: the promotion of
freedom for creative activities in a democracy of the normals, he is
bound to be beaten by the majority consisting of subnormals. There is
nothing left for him but to cater to the minority of careerists, the
one-eighth of the electorate representing superior intelligence. The
intelligence tests employed in the War showed that and also that
forty-five per cent of the examined, or about one half the total
population, had a mental capacity, or natural ability that would never
develop beyond the stage normal to a twelve-year-old child. They are
doomed to remain forever subnormal.
THE CAREERISTS AS THE ABNORMALS
The careerists are those who practice the careerist religion. The
careerist religion is the religion par excellence of modernity.
Someone once said, with the perfect candor of the North American, that
America is the land of opportunity. He meant that America is the land
of the Careerist or, as it has also been put, it is the land of the
man on the make. The careerist, or the man on the make, is of a
thousand genera and species, varieties and subvarieties, with
transition links between. One finds him at every level of society.
Excepting a negligible minority, the feminine career of today (as of
the last ten thousand years of the race's history) consists in the
acquisition of a husband. After that she is so identified with him
that her own life, as something distinct, individual and unique,
becomes blurred and then completely erased. The feminine careerist,
the careeristina, if you will, is a definite type. Consider the
unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the
mate, and then the mate's career. All the kinks and twists of the
feminine mind, resulting from the necessities of that fundamental
primary problem, would form a multitudinous and interesting list. The
most successful careeristinas are the absolutely unconscious ones
because they are not passively besieged nor actively bombarded by any
doubts as to what they want. They play their game exceedingly well as
do not the quasi-rebels and faint-hearted revoltees that form no small
percentage of the Newest Women. For a number of women the feminist
movement has been an attempt to break away from the traditions of
the wife-careerist, and to strike a line of auto-careerism. Can
the careeristina instinct, the fruit of the practice of so many
generations, be uprooted by the good intentions of a mere statesman?
But the masculine careerist is a marvelous creature. He is a biologic
sport, an abnormal variation. New York is the place to watch and
study him in his thousands and tens of thousands. You can observe
him climbing, climbing, climbing, precisely as an ant climbs a tree.
Nothing can really discourage or sway him from his chosen path. If he
is not getting on financially, he is getting on socially, or he is
using the one method of advance to help him with the other. How the
line of least resistance and greatest advantage is determined for and
taken by him is a fascinating process.
The careerist instinct, the inherited flair for a career, must not be
confounded with the instincts of self-preservation, self-expansion
or self-expression, because they are utterly different. Indeed, the
careerist instinct is often their direct antagonist, clashing with and
dominating them. The making of the career involves the distortion, the
mutilation, degradation, degeneration or even the complete suppression
of the true personality. But it is all instinctive. To consider the
life of the careerist as an expression of instinct will explain too
the success of so many who have no inner awareness of what they want.
These go straight for the career, looking neither to the right nor
to the left, without doubt or hesitation, just as they go for the
respiration business as soon as they are born.
Then there is the Super-Careerist. Ordinarily, the careerist is rather
obvious, easily recognizable, with diaphanous motives and conduct. But
there is another and rarer bird, the careerist of talent, even the
careerist of genius, whom it is not so easy to see through. Clever and
brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for
some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing
he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or
radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs
and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is
quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the
underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men and women, all
ideas and movements and forces he comes in contact with for his own
personal advancement, just as the slave making instinct guides the red
ant in all its activities to procure its captives. Ideas do not make a
hero out of him, but he makes heroes of ideas, because they serve him
in his ascent.
Because he is the most subtle, the most complex and the most deceptive
type of careerist, he is the most dangerous to the adventure and
speculation in intellect which mankind is. To say that he is a wolf in
sheepskin is to be unjust to him, since he is most successful when he
is most unaware of his own charlatanry. He is most sincere when he
is most insincere, and most truthful when he lies best. A little
self-consciousness of hypocrisy is a corrupting thing, much of it
completely incompatible with the most successful careerism. Tartuffe
is always applauded by the world when he plays Hamlet, if he really
believes in himself as Hamlet. And, as all he has to do, if he is at
all talented, is to look into his glass and see himself in the part,
he carries it off very well.
WHY THE STATESMAN FAILS
Slaves and careerists, subnormals and abnormals, are the important
elements of the constituency of every modern statesman. The financial
and social careerists as business men, professionals, artists,
publicists, presidents of countries, politicians, philosophers
dominate his outlook, his plans, his horizon. The slaves, the
inferiors, the subnormals exist merely to be exploited by them. No
one questions the causes of the multiplicity of them. No one asks why
there are so many little lives. For a fundamentally minded statesman
the control of the production of the careerist, why he is produced,
and how he may be prevented, becomes the primary problem of his art.
Well, you say, what are you going to do about it? That is human
nature. The Evils of Human Nature! There is the perpetual answer to be
repeated by our clever editors unto Eternity. You cannot get away from
human nature. It is human nature to be a careerist. It is human nature
to put the immediate triumphs of the self and its pleasures above
the more indirect, the more remote and distant benefits of a great,
wonderful, free community. We are all careerists. In so far as
democracy has succeeded as a form, it has persisted because there was
in it for the common man the promise of his getting more out of life
that way than any other way. For himself. And the devil take the
others. The myopia of such crude selfishness continues to determine
his politics to this very day. And so he proceeds to vote for favors
bestowed and patronage past or potential. That is, when he does not
throw his ballot away altogether into the fire of family habit,
sectional inertia, or race prejudice.
Again you say, that is human nature. It is human nature for us to
be narrow, to be confined within the circle of personal thought and
desire, without imagination for the beyond. So the calf is limited in
its wanderings to the radius of the rope by which it is tethered. The
servile soul will always be submissive and docile, greedy and stupid.
What else could you expect from the descendant of the solitary beast
who once lived for thousands of years in caves? Without servility of
the soul, without chains for the spirit of the wild animal against
the world, men could never have been driven to live together for
twenty-four hours in communities.
The conception of human quality out of which all social machinery has
been devised and built is a conception of slave quality and careerist
quality. As we are all caught in the net, as the unconscious memories
of our slave and careerist ancestors flow in our blood and echo in our
cells, all we can do is accept it and work with it. Human nature is an
incurable disease. Like Jehovah's definition of Himself, it is, it has
been, and ever will be. Everywhere the same, always the same, forever
the same, there is no way out.
POOR HUMAN NATURE
All of these strictures upon poor human nature are exceedingly
delightful to our careerists. Every unpleasant social fact, every
outrage to our best instincts, every exhibition of incapacity,
incompetency, inefficiency, indifference, every example of
super-criminal negligence is pardoned as an effect of that universal
sin, human nature. Take the case of the statesman and the diplomats
who failed to prevent the Great War, though they saw it coming for
years, and who should therefore all, Entente as well as German,
American as well as Japanese, be indicted for their criminal
negligence, precisely as a physician would be for failure to report
and stop the spread of an epidemic disease. All these crimes of
omission and commission are excused on the plea that it was all due to
human nature, and that what can be blamed on human nature in general
can be blamed on no one in particular.
Poor human nature! Flagellated on every hand, what are we to do with
it? Why is the careerist so numerous and ubiquitous? Why does the
slave-soul infiltrate like a cancer the soul of society with its black
fluid? Is freedom, the divine idea, nothing but the toy of an orator
to the majority, a distant star in the night to a helpless minority?
Yet the instinct to freedom, the appetite for freedom, flickers
through the centuries as a fitful flame, though snuffed out by every
gust of class passion, every wind of mob resentment, and every storm
of national jealousy. Though the inferior subnormals multiply into
great sheep majorities, and the careerists, like Napoleon, morbid
variants, involve millions in their disease, the idea of freedom
persists obstinately. Have we any reason for regarding it as other
than an illusion?
If freedom is an illusion, we must admit the doom of democracy. And no
Wagnerian crashes of orchestration mitigate the tragedy of the scene
as our eyes are opened to the twilight of our new gods. For what other
social methods are there left to us? In the struggle against nature's
barriers upon human aspiration for perfect satisfactions, it looks as
though every other method has failed us.
In the past, refined aristocracies and benevolent despotisms have
failed as miserably as our democracies are now failing and as we are
sure crude anarchism and communism would. Their inferiority has thrown
them on the scrap heap. As for our present ways of government as a
permanent method, the storage of power in the hands of the Clever Few.
War burns in the lesson of how little the careerist regards either
the subnormal or supernormal. He condemns them all sooner or later to
wholesale slavery and carnage.
Is man then never to be the architect of his own destiny? Are we to
surrender our faith in the future of our kind to the spectacle of a
miserable species sentenced by its own nature to self-destruction? We
thought to rise upon the wings of knowledge and beauty, lured by
the mysteries of color and the magic of design and the might of the
intellect and its words, that have transfigured life into the greatest
adventure ever attempted in time and space. But we find ourselves
merely another experiment, intricate and rather long drawn out, to be
sure, with marvelous pyrotechnics, magnificent effects here and there,
but bound to eliminate itself in the end, to make stuff for the
museums of the real conqueror of the stars yet to come. We are
condemned to be classed with the dodo and the mammoth by the coming
discoverer of an escape from the slave and careerist. And so let
us resign ourselves to fate. Let us eat of the humble bread of the
stoic's consolation in the face of the mocking laughter of the gods,
let us admit that Mind in Man has unconsciously but irretrievably
willed its own self-annihilation. What remains for us except to beat
our breasts and proclaim: So be it, O Lord, so be it?
MAN AS A TRANSIENT
Yet, true as it is that the human animal has achieved no advance
beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed himself from his
bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes, is there no way out
anywhere? Is there perhaps some ground for hope and consolation in the
thought that we, of the twentieth century, no longer see ourselves,
Man, as something final and fixed? Darwin changed Fate from a static
sphinx into a chameleon flux. Just as certainly as man has arisen from
something whose bones alone remain as reminders of his existence, we
are persuaded man himself is to be the ancestor of another creature,
differing as much from him as he from the Chimpanzi, and who, if he
will not supplant and wipe him out, will probably segregate him and
allow him to play out his existence in cage cities.
The vision of this After-man or From-man is really about as helpful to
us as the water of the oasis mirage is to the lost dying of thirst
in the desert. The outcries of the wretched and miserable, the
gray-and-dreary lived din an unmanageable tinnitus in our ears. Like
God, it may be but a large, vague idea toward which we grope to
snuggle up against. It seems implicit in the doctrines of evolution.
But how do we know that in man the spiral of life has not reached its
apex, and that now, even now, the vortices of its descent are not
beginning? How do we know that the From-man is to be a Superman and
not a Subman? How can we dare to hope that the slave-beast-brute is to
give birth to an heir, fine and free and superior?
We do not know and we have every indication and induction for the most
oppositely contrary conclusions. Life has blundered supremely, in,
while making brains its darling, forgetting or helplessly surrendering
to the egoisms of alimentation. So it has spawned a conflict between
its organs, and a consequent impasse in which the lower centres drive
the higher pitilessly into devising means and instruments for the
suicide of the whole.
As War shows plainly to the most stupidly gross imagination, the germs
of our own self-destruction as a species saturate our blood. The
probability looms with almost the certainty of a syllogistic
deduction, that such will be the outcome to our hundreds of thousands
of years of pain upon earth. In the face of that, speculations upon
a comet or gaseous emanations hitting the planet, or the sun growing
cold, become babyish fancies. How clearly the possibility is pointed
in the discussions about the use in the next War of bacterial bombs
containing the bacilli of cholera, plague, dysentery and many others!
What influenza did in destroying millions, they can repeat a thousand
times and ten thousand times. What else the laboratories will bring
forth, of which no man dreams, in the way of destructive agents acting
at long distance, upon huge masses and over any extent of territory,
is presaged in that single example. But besides thus willing, by an
inner necessity, its own annihilation, Life, in the very structure
and machinery of its being, seems caught into the entanglements of an
inescapable net, an eternity-long bondage it can never rip, to flee
and remake itself into the immortal image that is its God.
And so there go by the board the last alleviations of those unbeatable
optimists who would soothe their aching souls with at least the drop
of comfort: that if man is a mortal species, with not the slightest
prospect of a continuing immortality, not to mention a glorious future
and destiny, there are others. Man, after all, may be simply a bad
habit Life will succeed in shaking off. No philosophy or religion can
afford to be anthropocentric merely. It must include all life and all
living things to which we are blood-related. There are other species
or latent species to take up the torch that burned poor homo sapiens
and ascend the heights. The ant and bee may yet mutate along certain
lines that would make them the masters of the universe.
But no matter what species or variety gets the upper hand in the
struggle for survival and power, the implications of the qualities
necessary to victory in conflicts of individual separate pieces of
protoplasm will be there. Besides, life is always begotten of life.
That is why synthetic protoplasm is nothing but a phrase. It is
impossible to conceive of something alive, possessed of the property
of remembering, that is not possessed of a store of past experiences.
You can no more think of getting rid of these unconscious memories of
protoplasm than you can think of getting rid of the wetness of water.
They are imbedded in the most intimate chemistry of the primeval ameba
as well as in our most complex tissues.
The memories of the cold lone fish and the hot predatory carnivor who
were our begetters, may haunt us to the end of time. The bee and the
ant, too, have woven inextricably into the woof of their cells the
instincts that sooner or later would send their brain ganglia,
even when evolved to the pitch of perfection, to elaborating the
self-and-species murdering inventions and discoveries that are
apparently destined to slay us. The powers of unconscious memory and
unlearnable technique of reaction to experience, once grooved, thus
prove the great gift and the eternal curse of protoplasm. Making it
possible for it to be and become what it is and has, they have
also made it forever impossible for it to be or become its own
contradiction.
Add to this unsloughable remembrance of the past, for better, for
worse, the secretive consciousness of its present needs every living
thing, as against every other living thing, is obsessed with. As a
peregrinating, finite, spatially limited being, it is separated from
all other living beings by inorganic, dead masses, and yet driven to
contact with them by a fundamental impulse to assimilate them into
itself, and make them part of itself. That assimilatory urge is
present in every activity from coarse ingestion as food to the moral
metabolism of the hermit-saint who would influence others to do as he.
FATE AND ANTI-FATE
In effect the history of Life resembles the life history of the
smallest things we know of, the electrons, and the largest, the great
suns and stars of space. The electron begins, perhaps, as a swirl in
the primeval ether, joins other electrons, forms colonies, cities,
empires, elements of an increasing complexity, through stages of a
relative stability, like lead or gold. Until it reaches the stage of
integration which wills its own disintegration, that we have been
taught to look upon with proper awe and reverence as radium. And we
are told that nebulae wander until they collide and give birth to
stars, stars wander and collide and give birth to nebulae. Life begins
as a quivering colloid, goes on painfully to build a brain, which
automatically refines itself to the point of discovering and using
the most efficient methods of destroying others, and by a boomerang
effect, itself. Fate!
The conception of Fate was a Greek idea. The classic formula for
tragedy, the struggle of Man with the sequence of cause and effect
within him and without, that is so utterly beyond his grasp and ken,
or power to modify, originated with them. But they must also be given
the credit for having conceived an idea and started a process which,
at first slowly and gropingly, now slipping and falling, torn and
bleeding among the thorns of the dark forest of human motives,
presently goes on, with a firmer, more practiced, more confident step,
to emerge into the light as the deliberate Conqueror of Fate. That
idea-process, this Anti-Fate is Science.
Science began with the adventures of free-thinking speculators, who
revolted against religious cosmogonies and superstitions. Sceptics
concerning the knowledge that was the accepted monopoly of the
priesthood must have existed in the oldest civilization we know
anything of, more than twenty-five thousand years ago, the
Aurignacians. But it was to the Greeks that we owe that amalgamation
of curiosity delivered of fear, that merger of systematic research
and critical thinking untrammelled by social inhibitions which is the
essence of modern science. Out of them has come the great Tree of
Knowledge of our time, which is, too, the only Ygdrasil of Life,
undying because it lives upon successive generations of human brain
cells.
Science, as the pursuit of the real, began with very small things by
men with very small intentions. Inventories, collections of isolated
data, something permanent for the mind out of the flux of transient
sensations, little tracks and foot paths in the jungle of phenomena,
were their goal. With no sense of themselves as the mightiest of
master-builders, cultivating humility toward their material at any
rate, the little men ploughed their little fields, striking the oil
of a great generalization or classification or explanation with no
fanfare of trumpets.
First as freaks and cranks, then as scholars and pedants, then
protected and perhaps stimulated under the competitive royal patronage
as societies and academies, they prepared for the harvest. Comparing
them to pioneer farmers sowing an undeveloped territory is really
totally inadequate and inaccurate. For the most part, they were like
coral makers, laboriously constructing, with no vision, certainly no
sustained vision, of the whole. To the practical men of affairs, the
shopkeepers and traders, the land-owners and ship-owners, the soldiers
and sailors, the statesmen and politicians, the people who specialized
in maneuvering human beings and materials, they were, for this
futile devotion to abstract knowledge, marked ridiculous and absurd
weaklings, mollycoddles, babies, not to be trusted with the demands
and dangers of public life.
But it so happened remarkably late in history that with the discovery
of the possibilities of coal there was a great boom in the demand for
industrial machinery. At the same time there were thrown up the most
marvelous advances in physics and chemistry. Recurring War became not
the clashes of mercenary armies, but the catapulting of whole nations
at each other. New destructive devices out of the laboratories were
raised into the commandants of the course of history. Then science
acquired prestige.
Science as King, science as power, looms as the great new figure, the
overshadowing novel factor, in practical statesmanship. Unlike the
factor X in the traditional equation, it is the known factor par
excellence, the factor by which the value of all the other factors
of human life will be ascertained and solved. As knowledge of the
conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of
the race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the
inevitable, even the unknowable. Human history resolves itself into
the drama: Science contra Fate. Quite a change from the vaudeville
show of the restless personal ambitions of vindictive fools and greedy
scoundrels, the mischief and adventures of half-witted geniuses and
licensed rogues that have been figures of the prologue.
The future of science has become the future of the race. So much of
an inkling of the truth is beginning to be appreciated. That is
ordinarily taken to mean that the process by which the Wessex man
became the New York and London man, the accumulation of accidental
discoveries and inspired inventions of scattered individuals, will go
on, providing a succession of marvels and miracles for the careerist
and his retinue. Not only is he to be entertained and served by them,
but any commercial value will also be exploited by him. The natural
wonders of the laboratories have taken the place of the supernatural
absurdities of the medieval mind as a fillip for the imagination of
the man in the street. Even spiritualism apes the technique of the
physicist. The credulity of reporters alone concerning developments
in surgery, for example, is incredible. There is enough rot published
daily for a brief to be made out against the idolatry of science.
THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE
Science also as a religion, as a faith to bind men together, as a
substitute for the moribund old mythologies and theologies which kept
them sundered, is commencing to be talked of in a more serious tone.
The wonder-maker may have forced upon him, may welcome, the honors
of the priest, though he pose as the humble slave of Nature and her
secrets. Presently the foundations and institutes, which coexist with
the cathedrals and churches, just as once the new Christian chapels
and congregations stood side by side with pagan temples and heathen
shrines, may oust their rivals, and assume the monopoly of ritual.
Should its spirit remain fine and clear, should it maintain the
glorious promise of its dawn, should its high priests realize the
perpetually widening intimations of its universal triumph, and escape
the ossification that has overtaken all young and hopeful things and
institutions, the real foundation for a future of the species would be
laid, and so its ultimate suicide prevented.
The time has gone by, however, for any complacent assurance that the
redemption of mankind is to be attained by a new religion of words.
There is no doubt that the damnation or salvation of an individual has
often been determined by a religious crisis, in which the magic of
words have worked their witchery. There is plenty of evidence that a
psychic conversion will effect an actual revolution in the whole way
of living of the victim or patient, as you like it. William James,
in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," established that pretty
definitely. When it comes to groups, races, nations, the outlook is
wholly different. There is a conflict of so many and diverse habits
and interests, beliefs and prejudices, that hope for some common
merely intellectual solvent for all of them is rather forlorn. If at
all, the resolution of the conflict will come by a pooling of actual
powers and interests, in which the religion of science will play
the great part of the Liberator of mankind from the whole system of
torments that have made the way of all flesh a path of rocks along
which a manacled prisoner crawls to his doom.
SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE
Science has a future. The religion of science has a future. Can
science assure us that human nature, in spite of its beast-brute-slave
origins holds the possibility of a genuine transformation of its
texture? Can Fate's stranglehold upon us be broken? There will be
certainly a tremendous, an overwhelming increase in the general
stock of informations we call physics and chemistry and biology. An
abundance of new comforts, novel sensations, fresh experiences, and
breath-bereaving devices that will thrill or heal, will follow of
course in their wake. The religion of science will infiltrate
and penetrate and permeate by its capillary action the barbaric
superstitions, the ridiculous rites, the unsanitary insanities of our
social systems.
But what about the poor human soul itself, with its inherent vices
and virtues, its fears and indulgences, audacities and nobilities,
jealousies, shames, blunders, incurable likes, cravings and diseases?
Can science change the texture of the slave and careerist, if they
represent the subnormal and the abnormal? What about the Becky Sharps,
the Mark Tapleys, and Tom Pinches, not to speak of the Nicholas
Nicklebys and the Hamlets, the Micawbers and the Falstaffs? What
future have they as they recur in the generations? Indeed, does not
the very fact of their recurrence, of them and of the hundreds of
other types and temperaments, point implacably to the conclusion to
which the historian, the philosopher and the biologist have driven us:
that in the grip of an endless chain of pasts the human soul has no
future?
That may appear an irrelevant, an immaterial, and an incompetent
question to our men of business and affairs. Human nature, as fallen
angel or ape parvenu, has always looked upon itself as fixed for
eternity. "Human nature never changes, and is everywhere and always
will be the same." "As a man is built." "Bred in the bone." These are
the axioms of our social and economic Euclids. Indeed, Man, assuming
that his nature is as uncontrollable as the course of the stars, has
limited his research into the substance of freedom to a groping for an
understanding of the adequate external conditions of liberty. Thus he
set himself another of the insoluble problems he seems to delight
in by neglecting the most important factor in the equation. Yet the
invisible soul of man, ignored, as a variable, varying quantity, has
upset all societies and constitutions, and all schemes of bondage as
well as of freedom.
For freedom, it becomes obvious as soon as it is clearly stated, is
sheer impossibility until the internal conditions of his nature
are ascertained, and the way paved for their control. A simple
illustration of the working of this principle is supplied by our
democracies, grossly pretenders. How can a democracy be possible
without a knowledge of the control of the individually and socially
subnormal, who, since they offer themselves to exploitation by
the careerists, prove themselves the weak links in the chain of
co-operation with an equal opportunity for all, that is the democratic
ideal? In what does the equality or inequality of men consist? Just
what are the qualities necessary for successful competition, or if you
will, co-living, of man with his fellow-men, and how and why do they
operate? No freedom, independent of the servile repetitions of
history and heredity, is conceivable until these inquiries have been
elaborately carried out toward a certain working finality.
THE PROMISES OF EUGENICS
There are, to be sure, the claims and assertions and negative
achievements of the youngest of the sciences, eugenics. They are
invincible optimists, the eugenists: it is perhaps a case of a virtue
born of necessity. Thus Francis Galton, in the preface to the "Bible
of Eugenics," his essays on Hereditary Genius, declares: "There is
nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of
evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed
who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the Modern
European, as the Modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races."
High hopes beat in this declaration. But Galton could not have
foreseen that the signing of a scrap of paper by one of the Modern
Europeans would let loose all the other Modern Europeans in a
pandemonium of horrors the lowest of the Negro races could not but
envy as a masterpiece of its kind. It seemed to be suspiciously easy
for him to accept an excuse to slide down the dizzy height he had
climbed from the African level.
The eugenists would put their trust in the encouraged breeding of the
best and the compulsory sterility of the rest. But what is the best,
and who are the best, and where will you find them when they are not
inextricably emulsified with the worst? It's a long, long way to the
day of a segregating out and in of Mendelian unit-characters. Besides,
this is a strange world of choices. Nobody is to be considered worthy
of parenthood until he has fallen in love properly. Nobody who would
permit an outsider's decision as to when he was properly in love would
be worth thirty cents as a parent. There is the ultimate dilemma
of the eugenist--the dilemma which destroys forever the dream of a
control of parenthood from the point of view of merely psychic values.
NEW PSYCHOLOGY
There are the claims and outcries and promises of the
psychologists--the specialists in the probing of the human soul and
human nature. In our time, the demand for a dynamic psychology of
process and becoming, psychology with an energy in it, has split them
into two schools--the emphasizers of instinct and the subconscious,
the McDougallians, and the pleaders for sex and the unconscious, the
Freudians. A synthesis between these two groups is latent, since their
differences are those of horizon merely. For the McDougallians look
upon the world with two eyes and see it whole and broad--the Freudians
see through their telescope a circular field and exclaim that they
behold the universe. It is true that they own a telescope.
But what has either to offer our quest for light on the future of
the species? Nothing very much. Thus, to turn to the disciples
of McDougall. In a recent volume entitled, "Human Nature and its
Remaking," Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard contends that
Man, all axioms about his nature to the contrary, is but a creature
of habit, and so the most plastic of living things, since habit is
self-controlled and self-determined. By the self-determination of the
habits of the race will the new freedom be reborn. It sounds old,
very old. And pathetic because it recognizes original and permanent
ingredients of our composition in the words pugnacity, greed, sex,
fear, as elements to be accepted in any system of the principles of
civilization. It is the bubble of education all over again. What in
our cells is pugnacity? What in our bones is greed? What in our
blood is sex? What in our nerves is fear? Until these inquiries are
respected, conscious character building or even stock breeding must
remain the laughing stock of the smoking rooms and the regimental
barracks.
Come the Freudians. To them we owe the aeroplanes to a new universe.
They have opened up for us the geology of the soul. Layer upon layer,
cross-section upon cross-section have been piled before us. And what
a melodramatic cinema of thrills and shivers, villains and heroes,
heroines and adventuresses have they not unfolded. Each motive, as
the stiff psychologist of the nineteenth century, with his
plaster-of-Paris categories and pigeon holes and classifications,
labelled the teeming creatures of the mind, becomes anon a strutting
actor upon a multitudinous stage, and an audience in a crowded
playhouse. Scenes are enacted the febrile fancy of a Poe or a de
Maupassant never could have conjured. The complex, the neurosis, the
compulsion, the obsession, the slip of speech, the trick of manner,
the devotion of a life-time, the culture of a nation all furnish bits
for the Freudian mosaic. Attractions and inhibitions, repulsions and
suppressions are held up as the ultimate pulling and pushing forces of
human nature.
But is the problem solved? Is not human nature primarily animal
nature? And do we so thoroughly understand this animal nature? Does
not all this material of Freudianism consist of variations upon social
burdens imposed on the original human nature? To be sure, at every
moment of life, choices have to be made, and choice involves the
clashing of instincts and motives, with victory for one or some, and
defeat for the others. But the Freudian material per se--the sex
material--is it not merely the by-product of a certain state of
society? A sane society would eliminate nearly all of Freudian
disease, but still have original human nature upon its hands. Why is
it that of two individuals exposed to the same situation, one will
develop a complex, the other will remain immune? The only soil we know
of, the real foundation stones of our being and living, are the cells
we are made of. Tell me the cellular basis of a complex, and I will
grant that you have arrived at some real knowledge.
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.
To Berthold belongs the honor of being the first experimental
demonstrator who proved the reality of a gland with a true internal
secretion and the power it exercised through the blood upon the
entire organism. Besides, he showed that a typical gland of external
secretion could also have an internal secretion, a possibility never
before considered. That two kinds of cells could live within the same
gland: one set usually recognized as producing the external secretion,
the other evolving the internal secretion, was an astounding original
conception.
ENTER CLAUDE BERNARD
Science is supposed to be immune to the personal prejudices and
emotional habits of the vulgar. It is the tradition that a new
contribution to knowledge emerging from no matter how obscure the
source, should be hailed as a gift from the gods. But the sad truth of
the matter is that a new finding in science requires as much backing
as a new project in high finance or social climbing. Berthold, like
Mendel, the founder of genetics, was a great pioneer. But there was no
personage, no person of consequence, with no patronage by anyone of
consequence, no wife or kin, to push him, and no audience to stimulate
him. His poor four little pages of a report, published ten years
before Darwin's "Origin of Species," attracted not the slightest
notice. Buried in the print of a journal with a subscription list of
possibly two or three hundred, of whom perhaps two dozen may have been
interested enough to read it, but without any recorded reaction on the
part of any of them, it was a flash in the pan. Though it was good,
original, conclusive stuff, it was cut dead, absolutely, by the
scientific world. As a result, forty years elapsed before the
implications of his studies were rediscovered by the Columbus of the
modern approach to the internal secretions, the American Frenchman,
Brown-Sequard.
It took a first class man of genius in his field, in Paris, with a
respected position in the whirl of its medical planetary system and
a university appointment, to boom and advertise the doctrine of the
internal secretions, so that people began to sit up and listen and
take sides--on the wrong grounds. This Frenchman was Claude Bernard.
At a series of lectures on experimental physiology delivered at the
College of France, in 1855, he coined the terms internal secretion and
external secretion and emphasized the opposition between them, on the
basis of an incorrect example, the function of the liver in the supply
of sugar to the blood.
Just as Columbus reached America, carried on a series of logical
syllogisms, built upon unreal pictures of a straight path to the East,
Claude Bernard opened up the continent of the internal secretions to
the experimental enthusiasts of his time by a discovery which today
is not grouped among the phenomena of internal secretion at all. In
attempting to throw light upon the disease diabetes, in which there
is a loss of the normal ability of the cells to burn up sugar, he
examined the sugar content of the blood in different regions of the
body. He found that the blood of the veins, in general, contained less
sugar than the blood of the arteries, which meant that sugar was taken
from the blood in passing through the tissues. But the venous blood of
the right side of the heart contained as much sugar as the arterial
blood. Evidently, somewhere, sugar was added to the blood in the veins
before it got to the heart. The blood of the vein which goes from
the liver to the right side of the heart was then found to contain a
higher percentage of sugar than is present in the arteries. The vein
which transmits the blood from the intestines to the liver had
the usual lower percentage of sugar corresponding to the analysis
established for the other veins. The liver, therefore, must add sugar
to the blood on its way to the heart. Extraction of the liver then
revealed the presence in it of a form of starch, an animal starch,
which Bernard called glycogen, the sugar-maker. The origin of the
sugar added to the blood on its way from the liver to the heart was
thus settled. Bernard went on to hail glycogen and the sugar derivable
as the internal secretions of the liver, and to erect, and then drive
home, a theory of internal secretions and their importance in the body
economy.
The case he had hit upon was exquisitely fortunate, as the liver had
hitherto been regarded purely a gland of external secretion, the bile.
Nowadays, glycogen and the blood sugar are not considered internal
secretions, because they are classified as elementary reserve food,
while the concept of the internal secretions has become narrowed down
to substances acting as starters or inhibitors of different processes.
Moreover, the process of liberation of sugar from glycogen itself in
the liver, upon demand, is today set down to the action of an internal
secretion, adrenalin. Claude Bernard's conception, like a novelist's
characters, has turned upon its creator, taken on a life of its own,
and evolved into something he never intended. He looked upon an
internal secretion as simply maintaining the normal composition of the
blood, which bathed alike and treated alike the democracy of cells.
Today, the blood is believed merely the transporting medium for the
internal secretion, destined for a particular group of cells.
ADDISON'S AS THE FIRST ENGLISH CONTRIBUTION
The years 1855-56 are red-letter years in the history of the glands of
internal secretion. They witnessed, not only the publication of
Claude Bernard's "Lectures on Experimental Physiology," but also the
appearance of a monograph by Thomas Addison, an English physician,
entitled "On the constitutional and local effects of disease of the
suprarenal bodies." In this, he described a fatal disease during which
the individual affected became languid and weak, and developed a dingy
or smoky discoloration of the whole surface of the body, a browning
or bronzing of the skin, caused generally by destructive tuberculous
disease of the suprarenal or adrenal bodies. Addison promptly put down
these constitutional effects of loss of the adrenal bodies to loss
of something produced by them of constitutional importance. He was
particularly struck by the change in the pigmentation of the skin, so
much so that his own designation for the affection was "bronzed
skin." Since then, however, the condition has been universally styled
Addison's Disease.
There is something spectacularly mysterious and picturesque about most
of the malign, insidious effects of the disease which appealed at once
to a number of investigators. The most adventurous, the most daring,
the most imbued with enthusiasm for the experimental method, was the
American Frenchman, Brown-Sequard, who is acknowledged the father of
modern knowledge of the glands of internal secretion, though to Claude
Bernard belong the honors of the grandfather.
BROWN-SEQUARD THE GREAT
Brown-Sequard, as the outstanding figure in the history of the glands
of internal secretion, deserves some notice as a personality. In the
words of the note-makers for novels and plays, he was a card. He was
born in 1817 at Port-Louis, on the island of Mauritius, off Africa,
then French property. His father was a Mr. Brown, an American sea
captain; his mother a Mme. Sequard, a Frenchwoman. Early in childhood,
the father sailed away on one of his voyages and never came back. The
mother thereafter supported herself and her son sewing embroideries.
At fifteen, Brown-Sequard, with the physical appearance of an Indian
Creole, was clerking in a colonial store by day, and composing poetry,
romances and plays by night. The call of Paris was in his blood, which
was indeed a supersaturated solution of wanderlust.
Soon he was landed there to make his fortune in literature, only too
speedily to be disillusioned. Exhibition of manuscripts to a leading
literary light merely evoked curt advice to learn a trade or go into
business. He would have none of either and studied medicine instead,
earning his way by teaching as he learned. In the laboratories, he
made the acquaintance of people who more than once were to be his
salvation in the ups and downs of his career. In 1848 he was one of
the secretaries of the Society of Biology, newly founded by Claude
Bernard.
Some trouble, perhaps some effect upon his health of cholera which
then swept Paris, caused him to return to his native Mauritius, to
encounter an epidemic of cholera. There he slaved manfully, for which
a gold medal was afterward struck for him. That over with, he embarked
in 1852 for New York, without a word of American, learning English on
board. This was the first of a series of voyages. As he often boasted,
he crossed the ocean sixty times, not a bad record for the days when
the _Mauretania_ was still in the womb of time. He made a hopeless
failure out of practice in New York, became so poor as to practice
obstetrics at five dollars a case, and married a niece of Daniel
Webster. Then he went back to Paris. Back to America next as Professor
of Physiology at the University of Richmond, Virginia, a job occupied
for a few months only because of his opinions on slavery, ostensibly
anyhow.
To Paris then the rolling stone meandered again. So that soon after he
was offered and accepted the charge of a great newly opened hospital
for epileptics in London. That proved merely an interlude and in
1863 we find him back in his fatherland (if we may hold France his
motherland) as Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard. In New York
fame preceded him now with a thousand trumpets, so that on the day of
his arrival, he was kept busy seeing patients until night, when he
had to desist because of exhaustion. But still he did not prosper. An
unfortunate second marriage almost broke his heart, and an attempt
to found in New York a new medical periodical, the _Archives of
Scientific and Practical Medicine and Surgery_, got him into hot
water. Not until the death of Claude Bernard in 1878 left vacant the
chair of physiology in the College of France, did he find peace and
rest. He hastened to Paris, was appointed, and lived, in spite of the
most erratic of existences, to the ripe old age of 78, working up to
the last minute.
Addison's monograph stimulated Brown-Sequard, in the year after its
printing, to reproduce the fatal disease experimentally by excising
the suprarenal capsules in animals. Addison was very modest in his
monograph. He stated that the first case of the malady had been
reported by his great predecessor at Guy's Hospital, London, Richard
Bright, the describer of Bright's Disease. Then he talks about the
"curious facts" he had "stumbled upon" and refers to an "ill-defined
impression" that these suprarenal bodies, in common with the spleen
and other organs, "in some way or other minister to the elaboration of
the blood." In the preface to his work he had spoken more confidently
of the fact that Nature, as an experimenter and a vivisector, can
beat the physiologist to a frazzle. Indeed, he begins like this: "If
Pathology be to disease what Physiology is to health, it appears
reasonable to conclude that, in any given structure or organ, the laws
of the former will be as fixed and significant as those of the latter:
and that the peculiar characters of any structure or organ may be as
certainly recognized in the phenomena of disease as in the phenomena
of health. Although pathology, therefore, as a branch of medical
science, is necessarily founded on physiology, questions may
nevertheless arise regarding the true character of a structure or
organ, to which occasionally the pathologist may be able to return a
more satisfactory and decisive reply than the physiologist--these two
branches of medical knowledge being thus found mutually to advance and
illustrate each other. Indeed, as regards the functions of individual
organs, the mutual aids of these two branches of knowledge are
probably much more nearly balanced than many may be disposed to admit:
for in estimating them we are very apt to forget how large an amount
of our present physiological knowledge respecting the functions of
these organs has been the immediate result of casual observations made
on the effects of disease." William James expressed the same thought
some decades later, when he emphasized that the abnormal was but the
normal exaggerated and magnified, played upon by the limelight, and
therefore the best teacher and indicator of the exact definition and
limitations of the normal.
Addison, speaking before the South London Medical Society in 1849,
declared that in all of three afflicted individuals there was found a
diseased condition of the suprarenal capsules, and that in spite of
the consciousness "of the bias and prejudice inseparable from the hope
or vanity of an original discovery ... he could not help entertaining
a very strong impression that these hitherto mysterious organs--the
suprarenal capsules--may be either directly or indirectly concerned
in sanguification (the making of the blood): and that a diseased
condition of them, functional or structural, may interfere with the
proper elaboration of the body generally, or of the red particles more
especially...." A modern, acquainted with after developments, would
say that Addison was very hot upon the trail indeed. But withal,
though he must have been well aware of John Hunter's advice to Jenner
on vaccination, "Don't think, make some observations," his training in
the indirect reasoning and deductions of the clinician prevented him
from going right on to a direct experimental test of his theories.
This Brown-Sequard proceeded to do. Removing the adrenal glands in
several species of animals, he found, meant a terrible weakness in
twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and death shortly after. If only one
were removed, there was no change apparent in the normal animal, but
death occurred rapidly upon removal of the other, even after a long
interval. Furthermore, transfusion of blood from a normal into
one deprived of its suprarenals prevented death for a long time,
indicating that the suprarenals normally secreted something into the
blood necessary to life.
The years 1855-1856 beheld two other important glands of internal
secretion, the thyroid, the gland in the neck astride the windpipe,
and the thymus, in the chest above the heart, make their debut.
The thymus was introduced by the great classic monograph of Friedleben
on the "Physiology of the Thymus," in which he mentioned the usual
forgotten pioneers: Felix Plater, a Swiss physician, who in 1614 had
found an enlarged thymus in an infant dying suddenly, and Restelli,
an Italian, who interested himself in the effects of removal of the
thymus more than ten years before. Friedleben believed that in the
young without a thymus, there occurred a softening of the bones, and
general physical and mental deterioration. He started the ball rolling
for a number of researches.
Moritz Schiff, of Frankfort-on-the-Main, showed that excision of the
thyroid gland in dogs is invariably fatal. A number of physicians in
the first half of the century had reported certain remarkable symptoms
associated with enlargement of the thyroid gland, as goitre. In 1825
the collected posthumous writings of Caleb Perry, an eminent physician
of Bath, England, recorded eight cases, in which, together with
enlargement of the gland, there developed enlargement and palpitation
of the heart, a distinct protrusion of the eyes from their sockets and
an appearance of agitation and distress. Schiff's paper was the first
to throw any light on the subject. But for some reason, probably the
same as in Berthold's forlorn experiments with the sex glands, the
work of a person of no importance was ignored, or perhaps the more
charitable view is that it was forgotten. Yet the tide of observation
kept sweeping in relevant data.
In 1850, Curling, an English pathologist, studying the cretinous
idiots of Salzburg, written about centuries before by Paracelsus,
discovered that with their defective brain and mentality there
was associated an absence of the thyroid body, and accompanying
symmetrical swellings of fat tissue at the sides of the neck. Then
Sir William Gull in 1873 painted the singular details of a cretinous
condition developing in adult women, a condition to which another
Englishman, William Ord, of London, five years later donated the title
of myxedema, because of a characteristic thickening and infiltration
of the skin that is one of its features.
Surgery then enters upon the scene. The great Swiss surgeon. Theodore
Kocher, performed the first excision of the thyroid gland in human
beings for goitre, in the same year. In 1882, J.L. Reverdin, another
surgeon of Geneva, noticed that in man complete removal of the thyroid
was followed by symptoms identical with those collected under the name
of myxedema, and used the phrase "operative myxedema" to emphasize
his conviction of the connection between them. Then Schiff, in
1884, neglected twenty-five years, came back, with an array of
demonstrations, proving that the various symptoms, tremors, spasms and
convulsions, following removal of the thyroid, could be prevented by
a previous graft of a piece of the gland under the skin, or by the
injection of thyroid juice into a vein or under the skin, or by the
ingestion of thyroid juice or the raw thyroid by mouth.
A crystallization of ideas about the true function of the thyroid was
now inevitable. In 1884, Sir Victor Horsley produced an experimental
myxedema by removal of the thyroid in monkeys, resembling closely in
its symptom-picture the disease as it occurs in human beings. Moebius,
a German neurologist, came out boldly for the conception that a number
of ailments could be due to qualitative and quantitative changes in
the secretion of the thyroid, and that just as myxedema and cretinism
were due to an insufficiency of the secretion, Parry's disease was
to be ascribed to an excessive outpouring of it. The next steps
were easy. In 1888, Sir Felix Semon, as an outcome of a collective
investigation, established for all time that cretinism, myxedema and
post-operative myxedema were one and the same.
It was bound to occur to someone that if human myxedema and animal
experimental myxedema were one and the same, Schiff's procedure of
prevention and cure by feeding thyroid gland by mouth in the latter
could be applied to the former. The idea occurred to two men, Murray
and Howitz, in 1891. Murray's patient, a Mrs. H., was shown before the
Northcumberland and Durham Medical Society, an English country medical
organization, in February, 1891. She was forty-two years old and had
borne nine children. The illness attacking her had begun insidiously,
with a gradual enlargement and thickening of her face and hands.
She had become very slow in speech and gait, sensitive to cold, and
languid and depressed in spirit to the point of inability to go about
alone. Murray, employing the glycerin extract of the thyroid gland of
a freshly killed sheep, injected twenty-four drops hypodermically,
twice a week. There was an immediate and marvelous improvement, which
continued steadily, Murray finding that it could be maintained by
feeding the gland by mouth. The features and skin returned to the
normal, speech quickened and she became able to walk about and live
her life without hesitation or assistance. She lived to the age of
seventy-four, dying in 1919. In the twenty-eight years, during which
it was always necessary to administer the thyroid, she consumed over
nine pints of thyroid, comprising the glands of 870 sheep.
Giants and dwarfs and fat people have always interested people as
freaks, departures from the usual and the normal, and have formed the
stock of popular museum, circus and country fair. Every mythology has
concerned itself with them. The Titans among the Greeks, Og, Gog
and Magog among the Hebrews, are examples of the fascination of the
superlarge. John Hunter, the founder of experimental surgery, spent a
fortune in chasing after the skeleton of a famous Irish Giant in 1783.
Dwarfs have also fascinated--witness the short-limbed satyrs of the
Greeks and the dwarf gods (Ptah and Bes) of Egypt, as well as the
vogue of the court dwarf-buffoons, of whom Velasquez has left us some
portraits. Fat people, obesity as a manifestation of personality, have
aroused wonder and amusement the world over. The Fat Boy has always
furnished good sport to the Sam Wellers.
All these characters, tall or short, fat or lean, are related to the
activity of a gland of internal secretion in the head, the pituitary,
which became a centre of interest in the late eighties. Because of its
situation, the opinion of the ancients was that it was the source of
the mucus of the nose, an opinion reinforced by the greatest anatomist
of the Dark Ages, Galen, and held up to the seventeenth century. In
other words, it was considered simply a gland of external secretion.
Experimental removal of the pituitary was essayed by Horsley in 1886,
the same man who two years before had reproduced myxedema successfully
in monkeys. Others succeeded his attempt. But the conclusions drawn
were uncertain or contradictory, resulting from the difficulties of
the operative technique of getting at a gland placed at the base
of the brain. Not until 1908 was the problem solved by Paulesco of
Bucharest, who devised a way of reaching it by trepanning the skull.
He was thus able to prove beyond a doubt that the pituitary gland was
essential to life, and that without it no animal could continue to
live for any length of time. Soon after, Harvey Gushing and his
associates at Johns Hopkins Hospital discovered that removal of part
of the gland was followed by a pronounced obesity and sluggishness.
A basis for the understanding of obesity and growth was then
established.
In the eighties, there came to the clinic of Pierre Marie in Paris,
a pupil of the great Charcot, various women complaining of headache.
They also told him about an enlargement of their hands and feet, and
an alarming change in the bones of the face. He differentiated the
affection from its imitators, and created its present designation of
"acromegaly" (enlargement of the extremities). Also he correlated
their relationship to the giants who have been mentioned. Acromegalics
have been also likened to the Neanderthal Man, who had probably, as
the gorillas may have, an excess of the pituitary in their systems.
For four years he studied the morbid phenomena in the tissues of these
sufferers at last consigned to their end. First one, and then another,
and then a third and a fourth exhibited a striking hypertrophy of the
pituitary body and a consequent widening of the portion of the base
of the skull which cradles the gland. He proceeded to say so in
the graduating thesis of his pupil, Souza Leite. The inference
was inevitable that the entire process was to be put down to an
overactivity of the pituitary. Ever since, too, the growth of the
skeleton has been accepted as controlled by that gland.
About this time another set of old observations came to life again,
related to those of Docent Berthold on the auto-grafting of the testes
of a cock, with complete retention of its sexual characters, which he
said, must be due "to the productive action of the testes, i.e., to
its effect upon the blood, and thence to the corresponding effect of
such blood upon the entire organism." Of course, stock raisers and
poultry fanciers have noted the interesting outcome of castration for
about as long as their professions have existed. And for ages the
diminution of sexual activity as a predecessor to the decadence of
senility has been harped upon. Rejuvenation, especially in connection
with sexual activity, as well as with tissue and spiritual elasticity,
has been one of the haunting phantoms of the imagination for as long
as we have records of articulate humanity. Together with El Dorado,
the Elixir of Youth has shared the honors with the Philosopher's
Stone. The idea of employing the chemical materials of the sex glands,
the testes or the ovaries, to bring back youth, to restore juvenility,
had not, as far as we know, occurred to anyone who at any rate put
himself on record, by word or deed, until 1889. The hero of the new
departure was the hero of so many daring adventures among speculative
experiments, Brown-Sequard.
At this time the wanderer was an aged sage, seventy-two years old,
fit, as custom goes, only for retirement and resignation to the fate
of all flesh. The old passion of experimenting upon himself as well as
upon the guinea-pigs, dogs, cats and monkeys, by which he was always
surrounded, was as alive and kicking as ever. I suppose he had been
thinking for years concerning some method for the resumption of youth,
for we find him exclaiming, when the opportunity loomed of a great
laboratory on Agassiz Island, Long Island, on one of his recurrent
flights to New York: "Would that I were thirty!" And other passages in
his personal communications refer again and again to his consciousness
of growing old. The miracles that were being performed by injecting
thyroid and feeding thyroid in animals probably acted as the spark to
an inflammable mass of ideas long smouldering in the subcellars of his
mind. The effects were reported to the Society of Biology in Paris,
one memorable evening, June 1, 1889, in two notes on the results of
the hypodermic injection in man of the testis juice of monkeys and
dogs, and certain generalizations deduced therefrom. Such juices, he
stated, had a definite energy-mobilizing or, as he put it, dynamogenic
action upon the subject himself, stimulating amazingly his general
health, muscular power and mental activity.
These experiments, their nature, the manner in which they were
conducted, the character and age of the experimenter, and the results
claimed, were exquisitely good stuff for ridicule. Cartoonists and
reporters leaped upon the theme with the avidity of the true-blue
interviewer. Paris, where to be ridiculed is to be killed in public
with the most ignominious of deaths, reacted as only the French
temperament can react. The wits of the salons crackled, the
bourgeoisie chortled, the proletariat roared. The Elixir of Life had
been discovered and it was excellent sport.
But Brown-Sequard remained unshaken. He had all the roues of Paris
running to him, and consequent charges of quackery and charlatanism.
How much of these unsavory epithets really applied to him will not be
determined until we have a better acquaintance with his more intimate
life. A biography and collection of his letters is needed. But it is
certain that the general principles he arrived at, aided as much by
the wings of intuition as by the clues of incomplete and incompletely
controlled experiments, survive as the foundations of whatever we know
about the internal secretions, and all our present viewpoints. He
summed these up in 1891 as follows:
"All the tissues, in our view, are modifiers of the blood by means of
an internal secretion taken from them by the venous blood. From this
we are forced to the conclusion that, if subcutaneous injections of
the liquids drawn from these parts are ineffectual, then we should
inject some of the venous blood supplying these parts.... We admit
that each tissue, and, more generally, each cell of the organism,
secretes on its own account, certain products or special ferments,
which, through this medium (the blood), influence all other cells of
the body, a definite solidarity being thus established among all the
cells through a mechanism other than the nervous system.... All
the tissues (glands and other organs) have thus a special internal
secretion, and so give to the blood something more than the waste
products of metabolism. The internal secretions, whether by direct
favorable influence, or whether through the obstacles they oppose to
deleterious processes, seem to be of great utility in maintaining the
organism in its normal state."
The only part of this statement not conceded today is that relating to
the formation of internal secretions by tissues other than those of
which the cells are definitely glandular, that is secretory: as can be
determined under the microscope. Brown-Sequard added to the concept
of internal secretions, fathered by Claude Bernard, the idea of a
correlation, a mutual influencing of them and of the different organs
of the body through them. The nervous system had hitherto been
regarded as the sole means of communication between cells, by its
telegraphic arrangements of nerve filaments reaching out everywhere,
interweaving with each other and the cells. The Brown-Sequard
conception inferred the existence of a postal system between cells,
the blood supplying the highway for travel and transmission of the
post, the post consisting of the chemical substances secreted by
the glands. To be sure, the doctrine was only an inference, though
well-founded, of which the direct experimental proof was not to
be obtained until the researches of Bayliss and Starling. Yet to
Brown-Sequard belongs the immortal credit, if not of the originator,
at any rate of the resurrector of the idea of using gland extracts to
influence the body. The unwarranted hopes aroused by his enthusiastic
reports of rejuvenating miracles have long since been dissipated.
Moreover, they smeared the whole subject with a disrepute which clings
to certain narrow and unreasonable minds to this day. But as every
physiologist since has acknowledged, he was and remains the great
path-breaker in the conquest of the internal secretions.
THE HORMONES
The problem of the internal secretions was now attacked from another
angle. A great Russian physiologist, Pawlow, called attention to the
fact that the introduction of a dilute mineral acid, such as the
hydrochloric acid, normally a constituent of the stomach digestive
fluid, into the upper part of the intestine, provoked a secretion
of the pancreas, which is so important for intestinal digestion. He
explained the phenomenon as a reflex, a matter of the nerves going
from the intestine to the pancreas.
His pupil, Popielski, threw doubt upon so easy an explanation, by
proving that the same reaction could be elicited even after all the
nerve connections between the gut and the spinal cord were severed. If
the relation was a reflex, it would have to be classed now as one of
those local nerve circuits, which are pretty common among the viscera,
a local call and reply as it were, without mediation of the great long
distance trunk lines in the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata.
The work of Bayliss and Starling, two English physiologists, was
commenced then to test the hypothesis. They soon found that the
experiment could be so devised as to exclude any influence whatever on
the part of the nervous tissues, and yet result positively. Thus, if a
loop of intestine was so prepared as to be attached to the rest of the
body only by means of its blood vessels, all the nerves being cut,
putting some acid into it was still followed by a flow of pancreatic
juice, no less marked than when none of the parts about the piece
of gut had been disturbed. It was evident that the stimulus to the
pancreas was carried by way of the blood stream. That the stimulating
substance was not the acid itself, was shown by the failure of the
reaction to occur when the acid was injected directly into the blood
stream. Since there was this difference in the effects between acid in
the intestine and acid in the blood, it was manifest that the active
substance must be some material elaborated in the intestinal mucous
membrane under the influence of the acid. So they scraped some of the
lining of the bowel, rubbed it up with acid, and injected the filtered
mixture into the blood. They were rewarded by a flow of pancreatic
juice greater in amount than any obtained in their other experiments.
From the filtered mixture they isolated in an impure form, a solid
substance which, when introduced into the circulation, has a similar
action. To this, of which the exact chemical make-up is as yet an
unknown, they gave the name secretin.
Secretin and its properties they used to generalize as a perfectly
direct and amply demonstrable example of an internal secretion.
Metaphors are no less valuable in physiology than in poetry. They
declared that the internal secretions appeared to them to be chemical
messengers, telegraph boys sent from one organ to another through the
public highways, the blood (really more like a moving platform). So
they christened them all hormones, deriving the word from the Greek
verb meaning to rouse or set in motion. As a science is a well-made
language, a new word is an event. It sums up details, economizes
brain-work and so is cherished by the intellect. The study of the
internal secretions has advanced by leaps and bounds since it became
convenient to speak of them as hormones. Withal, the brilliant work of
Bayliss and Starling stands as the third great foundation stone,
the first Claude Bernard's and the second Brown-Sequard's, in the
architecture of the modern concepts of the internal secretions.
CHAPTER II
THE GLANDS: THYROID AND PITUITARY
The glands of internal secretion, the history of which, as tools of
thought, I reviewed in the previous chapter, have each an interesting
evolutionary story. Without some acquaintance with that story, the
rough outline of their physical architecture, and the particular work
they are called upon to perform in the body, no adequate understanding
of their influence upon types of human nature and personality is
possible.
THE THYROID GLAND
This gland consists of two maroon colored masses astride the neck,
above the windpipe, close to the larynx. These are bridged by a narrow
isthmus of the same tissue. They remind one of the flaps of a purse
opened up. The gland has always attracted much attention because its
enlargement constitutes the prominent deformity known as goitre.
To begin with, the thyroid was once a sex gland, pure and simple. In
the lowest vertebrates and in the homologous tissues of the higher
invertebrates, the fractions of the thyroid are intimately connected
with the ducts of the sexual organs. They are indeed accessory sexual
organs, uterine glands, satellites of the sex process. From Petromyzon
upward that relationship is lost, the thyroid migrates more and more
to the head region, to become the great link between sex and brain.
How alive that function still is, is grossly shown by the swelling of
the gland with sexual excitement, menstruation and pregnancy.
Relative to the body weight it is largest in the mammalia, and
smallest in the fishes. It therefore grows larger as the vertebrate
ascends in the scale. It has, in fact, developed in direct proportion
to and side by side with the fundamental, differentiating vertebrate
characteristics. Of these, the possession of a dry hairy skin instead
of a moist or mucus bearing, chitinous skin, the ownership of
an internal bony skeleton and a large skull, and a complicated
development of brain, are the diagnostic signs. Thyroid internal
secretion has a very definite controlling relation to all of them: to
skin, its hairiness, moisture and amount of mucus, to the growth and
size of the bones, especially the bones of the extremities and the
skull, and to intelligence and the complexity of the convolutions of
the brain. Injury to the thyroid, especially in growing animals, is
followed by profound retrogression or arrest of development in skin,
skeleton and brain.
In the fishes and the cyclostomes the thyroid is represented only by
some small scrubby patches, little larger than the heads of pins,
scattered along the aorta, the great blood vessels from the heart, and
out a little way along each gill. It becomes larger and more compact
among the amphibians and reptiles, but still remains quite small.
Large and prominent among the birds and mammalia, it is largest and
most prominent among the primates and man. It is hence permissible to
think of the thyroid as a dictator of evolution, to crown it as the
vertebrate gland par excellence, and to call the typical vertebrate
brand marks secondary _thyroid_ characteristics in precisely the
sense of Darwin classing the horns of cattle as secondary _sexual_
characteristics.
In such enthusiasm for the thyroid as a determinant of evolution, its
pillar of cloud by day and column of fire by night, one should not
forget the other glands of internal secretion. In them all, we may
suppose, Life, tired of inventing merely prehensile, destructive and
reproductive organs, hit upon the happy thought of contrivances which
are in essence chemical factories to speed up the rate of variation
and so of a higher evolution.
CREATOR OF THE LAND ANIMAL
According to this conception the thyroid played a fundamental part in
the change of sea creatures into land animals. Experimentally, thyroid
has been used to transform one into the other. Thus the occasional
change of a Mexican axolotl, a purely aquatic newt, breathing through
gills, into the amblystoma, a terrestrial salamander, with spotted
skin, breathing by means of lungs, has long been known. Feeding the
axolotl on thyroid gland produces the metamorphosis very quickly, even
if the axolotl is kept in water. In the reptile house at the London
Zoological Gardens full-grown examples of the common black axolotl and
the pretty white variety are exhibited. Some are nearly three inches
long. Alongside are shown several examples of the amblystoma stage,
produced in one of the laboratories of Oxford University and at
the gardens by thyroid feeding. A variation of the thyroid in the
direction of increased secretion was probably responsible for the
first land animals.
THYROXIN, SECRETION OF THE THYROID
Under the microscope, as in the test tube, the thyroid shows
remarkable and unique features. Closed spherules lined by a single
layer of cells enclosing a gelatinous material known as colloid, which
stains deeply with acid dyes, comprise the units of its architecture.
Essentially, it may be pictured as a series of jelly bubbles secreted
by outlying cells.
A relatively high percentage of iodine is the unique distinctive fact
in its chemistry. Discovered by Baumann in 1895, the presence of the
element has focused the intelligence of chemists upon the gland,
with the consequent demonstration of arsenic also in it. It was soon
manifest that the secretion of the gland was dependent upon the
iodine content for its activity. Active extracts of the thyroid like
thyreoglobulin and iodothyrin were proven to contain iodine, and to
become inactive when the iodine was removed. Efforts to isolate the
iodine containing active principle in pure form were fruitless until
the work of Kendall at the Mayo Foundation. He obtained it as a white,
finely crystalline, odorless and tasteless substance, heat stable,
and analyzable. The free form separates as a sheaf of fine needles.
Kendall at first called it the a-iodine compound, then named it
thyroxin.
There are other internal secretions of the thyroid, with a function of
their own, that have no iodine. But they are secondary, and obscure.
Thyroxin is accepted today as the purified internal secretion of the
thyroid because all the effects of the whole gland may be elicited
with it. Thyroxin produces results with doses amazingly minute
compared with the quantity of whole gland necessary. Moreover, a dose
of thyroxin appears to last an organism in need of it over a period of
time; the other has to be administered continuously.
Studies with thyroxin carried on in recent years have rounded out the
whole concept of the business of the thyroid in the body economy.
One may sum it up by saying that the thyroid secretion is the _great
controller of the speed of living_. The more thyroid one has, the
faster one lives; the less one has, the more slowly one lives.
That is not to imply any direct proportion between the amount of
thyroid secretion in an individual, and the length of life to which he
is destined. The speed of living, in the chemical sense (which is the
fundamental sense), and the rate at which the chemical reactions go on
that constitute the process of life, are dependent upon the thyroid.
When the reactions go faster, more oxygen and food material are burned
up or oxidized, more energy is liberated, the metabolic wheel rotates
more quickly, the individual senses, feels, thinks and acts more
quickly.
Likening one energy machine to another, the thyroid may be compared
to the accelerator of an automobile. That is a rough and superficial
comparison because an accelerator lets in more of the fuel to be
burned up, while the thyroid makes the fuel more combustible. It thus
resembles more the primer, for a rich mixture of gasoline and air
burns at a greater velocity than a poor one. But the action of thyroid
could really be simulated only by some substance that could be
introduced into the best possible of gasoline mixtures, to increase
its combustibility by a hundred per cent or more. For that is what
thyroid will do to our food. Nor has it only this destructive or
combustion side. Withal there is at the same time a constructive
action, for the process frees energy to be used for heat, motion or
other need. The thyroid, therefore, in addition to its role as an
accelerator, acts, too, as the efficient lubricator for energy
transformations. So we see it as accelerator, lubricator and
transformer of our energies.
THE GLAND OF ENERGY PRODUCTION
The isolation of thyroxin has made possible the determination of the
influence of the thyroid hormone upon the evolution of energy in any
higher animal organism. There is, for every individual, a constant,
known as the metabolic rate, or the combustion rate, a reading of the
rate at which his cells are consuming material for heat. The metabolic
rate is thus a gauge of the energy pressure within the organism.
It may be calculated by measuring the amount of carbon dioxide gas
exhaled during a unit of time, and the number of calories of heat
radiated by the skin simultaneously. A simplified device has lately
rendered it practicable to make actual determinations by a few
five-minute readings of the rate of oxygen absorption by the lungs.
Plummer, also connected with the Mayo Foundation, has shown that what
would amount to less than a grain of the thyroxin would more than
double the amount of energy produced in a unit of time. To be exact,
one milligram of thyroxin increases the metabolic rate two per cent.
That illustrates some of the power of the internal secretion of the
thyroid and its importance to normal life.
THE MOBILIZATION OF ENERGY
But not only is the height of pressure of energy in the cells
controlled by the thyroid. The mobility of that energy is also
controlled. Without it, rapid and large fluctuations of energy output,
and elasticity and flexibility of energy mobilization for any sudden
mental or muscular act, let alone an emergency, become impossible. A
woman suffering with myxedema, the condition described by the English
physician Gull as a cretinoid state supervening in the adult life
of woman, has an insufficient amount of thyroxin in her blood and
tissues. She is clumsy and awkward and will stumble when endeavoring
to walk upstairs. Any effort is almost paralyzed because the range
of fluctuation of energy, the ability to mobilize energy, in turn
dependent upon an ability to increase the metabolic rate, is limited.
In slang phrase, she cannot step on it. Her existence is set to go at
a rate in the neighborhood of forty per cent below the normal. By the
administration of thyroxin, her metabolic rate can be raised to any
desired figure, the spark can be adjusted, so to speak, to any point
we like, and it can be so maintained for years.
In the normal animal, to be sure, the internal secretion of the
thyroid is not absolutely essential to life. So it contrasts with the
hormone of the minute parathyroids placed so closely to it, a minimum
dose of which is absolutely a prerequisite for continued life. The
fundamental chemical reactions within the cells occur in the complete
absense of thyroxin. But they go on in a relatively fixed, rigid and
unvarying way, confined within the narrow limits of a constant figure.
Under such conditions, the level of energy production is bound to be
low, and to remain low, and the modus of its mobilization slow and
unwieldy. With thyroid is introduced the trick of _catalysis_, or the
speeding up of the vital chemical reactions, through the agency of an
_intermediate_ which accelerates the process. It is par excellence the
great catalyst of energy in the body. (A catalyst is an intermediary
like the trace of water, which will bring about an explosion between
dry oxygen and hydrogen that without it have stayed inert with the
strongest currents of electricity.) Thus it supplies a mechanism not
only for quantity output of that subtle reality we label energy, but
also an apparatus for varying the available amount of it, and for
permitting the maximum range in ease and rapidity of its utilization.
The thyroid is still another device of life for procuring more and
more variation and differentiation, its goal, as far as we can peer
through the opalescent screen upon which its manifestations quiver.
From another point of view, the thyroid may be looked upon as the
organ evolved for maintaining the same amount of iodine in the blood
as there is in sea water. Sea water was our original habitat, since,
like Venus, we have all come up out of the sea.
The more intimate study of the composition of the blood has revealed
the most astonishing parallelism between it and the compounds of sea
water. The blood is sea water, to which has been added hemoglobin as
a pigment for carrying oxygen to the cells not in direct contact with
the atmosphere, nutrients to take the place of the prey our marine
ancestors gobbled up frankly and directly, and white cells to act as
the first line of defense. To keep the concentration of iodine in the
blood a constant, the thyroid evolved, since there is no iodine in
most foods and very little in those which do contain it.
That a minimum amount of iodine in the food is necessary to health is
shown by the existence of goitre regions. Around some of the Great
Lakes in the United States, for instance, the water does not contain
enough iodine. As a result, numerous cases of goitre occur. Iodine in
the form of sodium iodide in small doses will act as a prophylactic.
The amount of iodine in the blood is about one or two parts to ten
millions, and that of the liver is about three or four parts to ten
millions. Since the liver is the most complex and active chemical
factory in the body, its appropriation of a greater amount of iodine
for itself is understandable.
When thyroxin is administered in a single dose, there is a distinct
lag in the absorption of it by the tissues. A single dose does not
generate its maximum effect until the tenth day. This effect continues
for about ten days. Then there is a gradual decrease in the intensity
of reaction for another ten days. So that the length of time a single
administration of thyroxin functions within the body is about three
weeks. Again we have occasion to notice a protective device of the
cells. Since the presence of thyroxin in the tissues determines the
rate at which they burn themselves up, it is obvious that if there
were no mechanism for retarding its action, and at need varying it,
they really would set fire to themselves. That is to say, if the
tissues held a maximum of the thyroid internal secretion, and had to
take up more and more as it was fed out to them by the thyroid through
the blood, the pressure of energy production would attain the state of
a boiler without a safety valve. Even if self-destruction were avoided
by the ingestion of the largest quantities of energy-bearing foods,
rest for the cells would be difficult, if not impossible.
The thyroxin in the tissues diminishes after a period of great
exertion, the thyroxin probably being carried back to the thyroid
gland and kept there as reserve until further demand. So it has been
discovered that during the winter months, the thyroid glands of beef,
sheep and hogs all contain much less iodine than during the summer
months. During the winter months, manifestly, more energy is required
to maintain body temperature, hence the gland surrenders more of its
secretion to the tissues and so keeps less of it itself. There must
be, too, a certain wearing out of the potency of the iodine with time.
Even dead inorganic catalysts, made of simple elements, wear out after
having been used time and time again.
Though the thyroid is the supreme energizer, life is incompatible with
a certain excess of it. Death can be produced by successive daily
injections of its internal secretion. But it has, besides the
energizing effect, certain formative and nervous influences equally
marvelous. As illustrations, there are the cases of thyroid
deprivation in human beings, cretinism and myxedema, as well as
those in which it is believed there occurs an excess of the
thyroid secretion in the blood and tissues, the condition of
_hyper_thyroidism.
CRETINISM AS THYROID DEFICIENCY
Not that there is any arresting contrast of startling difference
between the phenomena presented by different species. The younger the
animal, the grosser the morbid symptoms witnessed. The animal fails to
grow. The bones and cartilage, except of the skull, fail to develop.
The abdomen projects and becomes large and flabby. The sex organs
atrophy. There is sterility. Pregnant rabbits abort, hens produce
very small eggs or none at all. These are the results of removing the
thyroid in animals.
Apathetic, indifferent, dirty, awkward, apparently idiotic, describe
the human cretins. Their skin is rough and coarse, peeling in sheets.
In some it is considerably knarled and creased as in the aged, and in
others swollen, hard and resistant. The hair becomes shaggy and rough,
losing all luster, and tends to grow irregularly and fall out. The
temperature becomes subnormal and an anemia supervenes. There is a
distinct reduction in the resistance to infections and intoxications.
Cretinism in the human is a condition in which the burning taper we
call Life flickers and smoulders and smokes. Thirty years ago it
was an example of the most hopeless idiocy. Whole populations were
afflicted with it. But neither man of science, nor bigot-fanatic,
assured by the Divine Confidence of its meaning as a visitation,
believed it could be modified an iota. Today, that inept word "cure"
may be applied to our power of attack upon it, provided it is
permitted to attack early enough. Modification, in the direction of
the most surprising betterment, is the miracle that has been wrought.
The history of a cretin runs somewhat as follows: A baby is born,
which in all appearances seems normal. Perhaps the nose is a trifle
squatter than even the average new-born's flat nose. There may also be
abnormal sleepiness, greater even than that of the normal baby in the
first month or two in that there is no spontaneous awakening from
the coma for food. But in most cases this is put down to normal
variability, or maybe to that limbo of all a baby's troubles:
weakness. After some months, it is noticed that the infant is failing
to grow at the normal rate, either physically or mentally. Examination
at this time reveals a curious thickening of the dental ridges. Then
the tongue takes the centre of the scene, by becoming unusually thick
and prominent, to the point of projecting beyond the mouth at all
times, and interfering with breathing, when the infant is in a
recumbent position.
More and more of the characteristics of the affection turn up. The
queer, repulsive, pitiful face of the cretins, which makes them all
seem brothers or twins, shapes itself. A yellowish, white or waxy
pallor; rough, dry, scaly, bloated skin; swollen, often wrinkled brow;
watery eyes, often almost concealed by the thickened eyelids; the
depressed pug nose with its wide, thick nostrils; large, erect ears;
the wobbly, drooling tongue, sticking out at one, yet not in derision;
the hair thin, and like tow in texture rather than human; eyebrows
and eyelashes are scant, and often absent; the nails short, thin and
brittle; the teeth, very late in coming, may be represented by a few
sharp points, irregular, decaying quickly, sometimes not succeeded at
all by those of the second dentition.
Whatever growth occurs is irregular and disproportionate. The trunk,
though small compared with the head, appears massive against the
background of the diminutive extremities. The back is somewhat humped,
arching at the waist-line, while the abdomen protrudes like a balloon,
with a hernia, often, at the navel. The extremities are short, bowed,
cold, and livid, covered with rolls of the infiltrated skin, rolls
which cannot be smoothed out. Hands and feet are broad, pudgy, and
floppy, the fingers stiff, square and spade-like, the toes spread
apart, like a duck's, by the solid skin. Above the collar bones there
are frequently great pads of fat which sometimes encircle the narrow
bull neck.
The mental state varies with the degree of deprivation of the internal
secretion of the thyroid. In the worst cases it is repulsively
vegetable. Even the intelligence common to the higher animals is
wanting. The cretins of the "human plant" kind, as they have been
nicknamed, will not recognize mother or father or any person about
them, or even a person from an object, and manifest no interest in
anything or anybody, not even toys. Hunger and thirst they manifest by
grunts and inarticulate sounds, or by screaming. They neither smile,
cough, nor laugh, but sit like sphinxes, breathing, but not reacting.
There are, of course, all grades and varieties. There are those who
recognize parents and familiar faces, and exhibit some evidence of
affection for them, acquire a limited vocabulary, and then cease, no
progress possible even with the alphabet. They attain the size and age
of two or three years and there stop altogether, as if a permanent
brake were applied to the wheels of their growth. Some higher types
may even come to speak connected sentences, and exhibit a certain
mild spontaneity, though stupid and slow and abnormally deliberate,
resembling the acquired form of thyroid deprivation or insufficiency,
for which Ord invented the name myxedema.
I have filled in with some detail this thumbnail sketch of thyroid
deprivation as it occurs in infancy to illustrate how wide a sweep the
gland's lariat embraces. Skin, hair, bones, muscle and fat, brain and
intelligence, growth and development, are modified precisely as the
size and shape of certain crystals are modified by the presence or
absence of ingredients in an apparently homogeneous solution. A
fertilized ovum, in which the predecessor of the thyroid gland is
present, that is to say, in which there is the seed and soil for its
sprouting, looks the same as one without that formative material. Yet,
when the time comes for the internal secretion of the thyroid to put
in its oar in the metabolic game, its presence or absence makes all
the difference in the world to the individual.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the concentration of
phosphorus in the brain was established as significant, the cry for
the emphasis of that fact was--without phosphorus no thought is
possible. We can much more relevantly declare that without thyroid,
no thought, no growth, no distinctive humanity or even animality is
possible. For the epigram about phosphorus was bombast, since it can
be declaimed with equal truth that without oxygen, without carbon,
without nitrogen, without any of the food elements that go to make
up the chemical composition of brain matter, no thought is possible.
Indeed, if one were set upon the indictment of a single chemical
element as the begetter of consciousness, the prisoner at the bar
would have to be copper. There is more copper in the brain by a
considerable degree than in any other organ of the body. Which perhaps
will be exceedingly regretted by the patrons of the aristocracy of the
soul who would have it as an emanation of a deposit in the brain of
silver at least, if not gold. They are like the old lady who would
never permit herself to be cured of her ailments except by gold plated
pills. Copper, however, is not necessary to intelligence. Without
thyroid there can be no complexity of thought, no learning, no
education, no habit-formation, no responsive energy for situations,
as well as no physical unfolding of faculty and function, and no
reproduction of kind, with no sign of adolescence at the expected age,
and no exhibition of sex tendencies thereafter.
EFFECTS OF FEEDING THYROID
How subtly the internal secretion affects every phase and aspect of
child as well as adult, by doing something to the speed of activities
in their cells, is told straightway by the effects of it when eaten
or introduced into the skin or blood of various people. A cretin,
idiotic, dwarfish, deformed, hopeless, an incessantly prodding burden
of sorrow to the mother, who looks upon the masterpiece she had
labored to bring forth, and beholds a terrible gargoyle, becomes
transformed when fed thyroid.
In a few days the cretin will get warmer, and require much less
wrapping and bed-clothing. With the improvement in circulation, the
color becomes better and the extremities lose their coldness. In a
week or so, irritability and resentment at disturbance appear. He will
begin to recognize and know his parents, smile and play. There is
a gradual return to the normal of the facial appearance, and a
resumption of growth. All kinds of marvelous growth effects occur.
Twenty teeth may be cut in six months. Coarse, rough dry, shaggy hair
becomes fine, silken, long and curly. The skin becomes soft, moist and
roseate. Inches in height may be added every month. Bright, active,
even talkative, are the descriptive terms an observer would apply
after a few months. A complete remaking of body and soul is apparently
affected.
Yet, should the administration of the thyroid cease, an almost
immediate reversion to the original vegetative condition is
inevitable. After a few days, reactiveness slows down, the child will
speak only when spoken to, will sit quietly in a chair all day and
act semi-anesthetized. Gradually hair and skin return to the previous
cold-blooded animal state, and the whole picture of the cretin is in
full bloom. Supplying the internal secretion of the gland promptly
repeats the transformation.
One wonders what is to be the ultimate fate of these reformed cretins.
Since the tale of the opening of life to them, once considered
hopeless idiots, is scarce a generation old, we have no data, as
yet, as to the character of their children or grandchildren, their
adventures and vicissitudes, in short, their life history. Those of
whom we have any record are normal and healthy school children or
workers, alive to the interests of childhood or their occupation
and social circles. No one outside their family knows that they are
cretins, and the most acute observer would be hard put to it to
suspect. What a theme for the reflections upon appearances the eminent
Victorians loved!
There are possibilities the imagination may envisage. One may suppose
such a cretin, with all his other ductless glands intact, grown
successfully to manhood under careful medical guidance. No one but
himself is aware of his affliction, outside of his medical advisers.
Luck aids him to rise in the world, or perhaps he has been born with
a spoon of the precious metals in his mouth. Adolescence, love and
marriage dance their sequence. Our hero of course keeps his dread
secret to himself. Whether such an omission of confidence would
entitle his wife to a divorce is something courts will be called upon
to decide sooner or later. But, without anticipating, the honeymoon
involves a trip to the South Seas. A storm and a wreck throws them
alone on an island, tropical, easy to live on, and rescue in the
course of a few months certain. The man, to his horror, discovers that
he has saved of his medicaments only a pill box containing half a
dozen of thyroid tablets, his requirement being one a day. He sees
them go day by day. Finally they are all gone. He feels his faculties
slipping hour by hour. Shall he tell her? Indecision grips him, and he
delays until the day when his consciousness sinks to the point where
his mind no longer grasps his problem. The wife must endure the
spectacle of the enchantment of her husband, and his change from
gallant lover to dull animal ogre. A new version of Beauty and the
Beast!
Cretinism as one manifestation of a soul without thyroid or without
enough thyroid is not all. The first great successes with thyroid were
achieved in adults, particularly adult women, exhibiting a peculiar
obesity, coldness, loss of hair and teeth and a remarkable lassitude
and torpor that might be summed up as a chronic drowsiness, like a
saturation of the blood with some narcotic drug. Or there may be a
melancholia, or a lack of ability to seize the finer points of a
mental process, or an argument treated in the abstract. Children
are said to be lazy, slow or dull. They experience an irritating
difficulty in understanding questions and expressing their wants and
desires, and so are declared to be vicious, or stupid.
All these are grades of the degeneration which Ord, the Englishman,
named myxedema. At its worst it is a sort of bloating and drying of
the body and the mind. Then there is infantilism, which is helped by
the giving of thyroid extract. It differs from the ordinary cretinism
in that, while one is reminded of the latter by the physical stunting
and the other stigmata, there is a certain amount of intelligence
which enables the individual to hold his own while he is a child. He
becomes a grown-up baby: at twenty prefers the company of children of
ten, and passes under the evil influence of designing so-called normal
persons. So dominated he will lie, steal, start fires, commit almost
any crime, with no inherent flair for criminality, but because of a
lack of independent judgment and inability to resist suggestion, and
a desire to please friends. He is simply an overgrown child who still
loves to play with toys, laughs and cries, becomes angry or afraid,
unreasonably and ridiculously, and yells for mamma when thwarted or
scared.
So much for what happens when there is not sufficient of the thyroid
secretion in the blood and tissues. Now to consider the effects of
an excess of it, the condition called hyperthyroidism, as the
insufficiency of it is labelled subthyroidism. Too much thyroxin can
be introduced into the system of a normal individual, or even a cretin
by the simple administration of too large doses or over too long
a time. Also a train of symptoms similar to those evoked by an
oversecretion of the thyroid may be mobilized by the taking of too
much iodine. Great sorrow, great joy, a sudden severe jolt to the
nervous equilibrium, sexual excitement, an overwhelming anger or grief
may leave in their wake a permanent hyperthyroidism. The symptoms are
the reverse of cretinism and myxedema. There is an over-excitability
of the nerves in place of sluggishness, and an over-reactivity of the
whole organism to its environment. The heart's action is too fast, and
under the slightest stimulus gets faster to the point of obtruding
itself into the conscious mind as a palpitation. Instead of the
lowered temperature and coldness of the cretin, there is a heightened
temperature, one or two degrees above the normal, and a feeling of
heat. The individual has a high warm color, does not sleep well,
becomes or remains thin no matter how much he or she eats, is
abnormally susceptible sexually, may suffer from a definite insomnia,
is emotional, and perspires freely. Alert, neurotic or high-strung,
magnetic, and imaginative are some of the descriptive adjectives
applicable. The eyes are bright and prominent, large and beautiful,
when they have not reached the stage entitled "pop-eyed." Or they may
even become so protuberant and bulging as to develop the expression of
one staring aghast at some ineffable horror. The latter is the feature
of only the severest types, when there is an associated goitre, the
combination designated as exopthalmic goitre.
There are, too, individuals in whom hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism
are mixed, or rather alternate. At one time they present the phenomena
of the one, at another of the other. They are the people who complain
of the cyclic quality of their moods and purposes. Their mood will
be a heaven of exaltation and exhilaration, and then descend into a
slough of despond from which they feel themselves inextricable. They
are always talking about the ups and downs of their mental states.
Headache and languor and fatigability, dry skin and lack of appetite
for food or exertion on one day or for one week, give way on the next
day, or for the next week, to an energetic gayety, and sweaty, flushed
skin, a prominent appetite for food and every sort of activity. Driven
to be forever on the go, for one period, in the next they feel like
lying down most of the day, with no inclination for any life whatever.
The stage of depression may go as far as a melancholia, the stage of
stimulation as far as mania. They may simulate manic-depressive or
cyclic insanity. Something restrains them, and holds them bound as in
a vise in the one cycle. And then they are driven on beyond themselves
by some invisible whip in the next.
THYROID AS DIFFERENTIATOR
Besides the action of the thyroid as energizer, lubricator, and growth
catalyzer, it has a remarkable power as a differentiator of tissues.
It determines the embryonic etchings of the different organs which in
their totality comprise the unique individual. Every multicellular
animal must first have existed as a single cell, the impregnated ovum.
With the body and personality of the ovum, the creature is one and
continuous, literally something the single cell has made of itself by
sub-dividing and differentiating. In the process, the cell mass often
goes through stages which stand out as individualities in themselves,
that appear on the surface absolutely unrelated. So the caterpillar
and the butterfly, to the naive child, seem as far apart as worm and
bird. In the case of the frog, the tadpole as a first sketch seems
completely an impossible and wild absurdity. Yet we know that there is
an orderly progression of events, a propagation of cells, a forward
going arrangement of chemical reactions, that results in expansion and
intricate complication of the organism. Just what the forces at work
in this most mysterious of all natural processes are, has been an
intellectual mystery that the best minds of the race have attempted
to get rid of with words like pangenesis (Darwin). Words of Black
(Mediterranean or Greek and Latin) origin, as Allen Upward has named
them, always cover a multitude of ignorances. The glands of internal
secretion, here, as in so many other dark places, provide the open
sesame to certain long closed doors of biology. They offer themselves
to us as the first definitely tangible agents which are known to keep
the process of growth going, and undoubtedly initiate the marvelous
unfolding of tissues and functions, organs and faculties summed up as
development or differentiation.
Thus by the direct feeding of thyroid at particular points in the
differentiating history most curious effects have been elicited. If
the gland is made part of the nutriment, the bathing environment, of
the tadpole, a hastening of its metamorphosis is attained. The tadpole
lives not out its day as a tadpole, but precociously turns into a
frog. But such a frog! It is a miniature frog, a dwarf frog, a frog
seen by looking through the wrong end of the telescope, a frog not
magnified, but micrified. Frogs have been so created the size of
flies. There has occurred a splitting of the two reactions which
ordinarily go hand in hand: the reaction of growth which is just brute
increase of total mass or weight and volume, and the reaction of
differentiation which is the finer process. The picture is a frog, but
a frog the size of a tadpole, a frog which has missed its childhood,
adolescence and youth, skipping over these transition stages into the
adult age, as a pigmy.
It is all as if a baby were suddenly to grow a beard and moustache,
evolve and shed teeth, and acquire the manner of an earnest citizen,
and yet retain the height and weight of a baby. That the spectacle
of such a superbaby is not quite the most fantastic of all
improbabilities is shown by the condition of progeria, first recorded
by the Briton, Hastings Guilford. A queer spectacle in which a child
incontinently grows old without having lived--in the course of a few
weeks or months. You look upon him and see senility on a small scale,
but with all its peculiarities: wrinkled skin, apathy, gray hair and
all the rest of it. All we can say about it is that it is probably due
to a paralysis of all the glands of internal secretion, a removal
of their influence upon the cells. Contrariwise to the feeding of
thyroid, removal of the thyroid of tadpoles will prevent their
development into frogs. If iodine is then fed to them, say mixed with
flour, normal metamorphosis will occur. If Body is the tool chest
which we carry about with us, as Samuel Butler said, then to the
thyroid belongs the name of tool-maker.
Another function of thyroid that must be taken into consideration is
what has been spoken of as its antitoxic function--in plainer English,
its power to prevent poisoning, or to increase resistance against
poisons, including the bacteria and other living agents which
cause the infectious diseases. Each molecule of food, ingested for
assimilation into our substance, accumulates a history of wanderings
and pilgrimages, attachments and transformations beside which the
gross trampings of a Marco Polo become the rambling steps of a
seven-league booted giant. In the course of its peregrinations, it
becomes a potential poison, potential because it is never allowed to
grow in concentration to the danger point. The thyroid plays its role
of protector like all the internal secretory machines. In an animal
deprived of a thyroid the feeding of meat shortens life--a single
sample of how it works to guard against intoxication from within. The
feeding of thyroid will also raise the ability of the cells to stand
poisons introduced from without--intoxications of all sorts. Alcohol
and morphine will affect in much smaller doses the subthyroid person
than the normal or the hyperthyroid. As regards the infections, which
directly or indirectly kill most of us, the injection of thyroid will
increase the content in the blood of the protective antibodies which
preserve us, temporarily at any rate, against malignant invaders. The
opsonins, for example, those substances which butter the bacteria so
that the appetite of the white cells for them is properly roused, are
mobilized by thyroid feeding or injection. Other substances in the
blood which destroy and dissolve bacteria are also increased. The
thyroid probably performs these functions by sending its secretion
to the cells directly responsible for the immunity reactions, and
stimulating them to activity.
A sketch of the thyroid like the foregoing shows it as the wondrous
controller of vitality and growth, and indefatigable protector against
intoxicants and injuries. When it is sufficiently active, life is
worth while; when it is defective, life is a difficult threatening
blackness. That would make it out as the gland of glands. It is
tremendously important, without a doubt, in normal everyday life. But
no more so than the other members of the cast. The position of star it
may claim, but in vain. The other glands of internal secretion to
be sketched will each, when the marvels of its business in the
cell-corporation are considered, present itself as candidate for the
honors of the president. Justice should give fair credit to all
the organs which fabricate the reagents of individuality, and the
regulators of personality.
THE PITUITARY
In the human skull, the pituitary is a lump of tissue about the size
of a pea lying at the base of the brain, a short distance behind the
root of the nose. It is of a grayish-yellow color, unpretentious and
insignificant enough in appearance, and so long neglected by the
scientists who boast their immunity to the glamor of the spectacular.
Guesses at its nature date back to Aristotle.
Like most of its colleagues among the glands of internal secretion,
it is really two glands in one, two glands with but a single name. At
least it consists of two different parts, distinct in their origin,
history, function and secretions, but juxtaposed and fused into what
is apparently a homogeneous entity. They are conveniently spoken of as
the anterior gland and the posterior gland.
In the embryo, the anterior gland is derived by a proliferation of
cells from the mouth area. The posterior gland represents an outgrowth
of the oldest part of the nervous system. When it is traced back along
the tree of the vertebrate species, it is found to be present in all
of them. An ancient invention, its precursor has been identified in
worms and molluscs and even among the starfish. "The pituitary
is practically the same, from myxine to man." A trusted veteran,
therefore, among the internal secretory organs, its importance can be
surmised.
To understand the story of the pituitary, variously acquired bits of
information concerning it have been assembled and fitted together like
the fragments of a picture puzzle, as Cushing has so well put it. Here
and there pieces stick out, obviously out of place. The relations of
some of them to one another or to the whole design are not at all
clear. Parts appear to have been irrevocably lost, or not yet to have
turned up. Chance bystanders will select odd figures and articulate
them into a new harmony. Yet out of the jumble of fragments, a fairly
respectable insight has been gained in less than a half century.
The pituitary is cradled in a niche at the base of the skull which,
because of its form, is known as the Sella Turcica or Turkish saddle.
So situated, an operative approach to it is overwhelmingly difficult.
On the other hand, X-ray studies are favored. "Nature's darling
treasure" it might be called, since there has been provided a skull
within the skull to shelter it.
Under the most highly magnifying lenses of the microscope, three kinds
of cells have been distinguished. The anterior gland is a collection
of solid columns of cells, surrounded by blood spaces into which their
secretion is undoubtedly directly poured. A gelatinous material,
presumed to be the internal secretion of the gland, has, in fact, been
observed emerging from the cells into the blood spaces. The posterior
lobe, or gland, consists of secreting cells producing a glassy
substance which finds its way into the spinal fluid that bathes the
nervous system. The spinal fluid itself is a secretion of another
gland at the base of the brain, the choroid. Nerves and internal
secretion are associated here with a closeness symbolic of their
general relations.
From each portion of the gland (to stick to the accepted nomenclature
of speaking of the two glands as one) an active substance has been
isolated. Robertson, an American chemist, separated from the anterior
lobe a substance soluble in the fat solvents, like ether and gasoline,
which he christened tethelin. But P.E. Smith has shown that the active
material is soluble neither in boiling water nor in boiling alcohol,
the typical fat solvent. A number of facts favor the idea of the
anterior lobe cells as stimulants of growth of bone and connecting
and supporting tissues generally. From the posterior lobe, pituitrin,
believed its internal secretion, has been obtained in solution.
Pituitrin is a substance of many marvelous functions. In general, it
controls the _tone_ of the tissues, of involuntary or smooth muscle
fibres of the blood vessels and the contractile organs of the body
like the intestines, the bladder and uterus. When injected, it will
slowly raise the blood pressure and keep it raised for some time, and
will increase the flow of urine from the kidneys and of milk from the
breasts. It will also cause an intense continued contraction of the
bladder and the uterus. It is also said to control the salt content of
the blood upon which its electrical conductivity and other properties
depend. Normally, there is a certain fixed ratio of the salts in the
blood, which keeps them like the ratio in sea-water. Again, we have
an example of the curious atavism of the internal secretions. The
thyroid, remember, keeps the iodine concentration of the blood like
that of the ocean, our original habitat. Pituitrin likewise does its
part to maintain our internal environment as near as possible to what
was once the surrounding medium. A substance somewhat similar has been
found in the skin glands of toads.
The extraordinarily well protected position of the pituitary, its
persistence throughout life, and its abundant blood supply, emphasize
its vital importance. No other gland of internal secretion can
adequately substitute for it. Complete expiration means death, in two
or three days, with a peculiar lethargy, unsteadiness of gait and loss
of appetite, emaciation, and a fall of temperature, so that the
animal becomes cold-blooded, its temperature the same as that of the
atmosphere it occupies. If only part of the anterior lobe is taken
away, there occurs a remarkable degeneration of the individual. The
degeneration is not a mucinous infiltration of the skin and the
internal organs which occurs with thyroid deprivation, but a fatty
degeneration, with a tendency to inversion of sex. A singular
somnolence, a dry skin, loss of hair, a dull mentality, sometimes
epilepsy, and a noticeable craving for and tolerance of sweets appear.
These are but a few of the observations obtained in experimental
sub-pituitarism, that is, underaction or insufficient secretion of the
pituitary, produced by removing part of the anterior gland.
If such an experimental sub-pituitarism is started in infancy, for
instance in puppies, there is a cessation, or marked hindering and
slowing of growth. That is, dwarfs are artificially created. Apropos,
pathologists have shown that in several true human dwarfs the gland
is rudimentary or inadequate. All of which goes hand in hand with the
evidence that the skeleton stands directly under the domination of the
pituitary.
REGULATOR OF ORGANIC RHYTHMS
There are certain other singular by-effects of the gland in its
relation to the periodic phenomena of the organism like hibernation,
sleep, and the critical sex epochs of both sexes. In hibernation, or
winter sleep, the animal in cold weather passes into a cataleptic
state in which it continues to breathe, more deeply but more slowly
than when awake, but shows no other signs of consciousness or life.
A lowered blood pressure and a marked insensitivity to painful and
emotional stimuli go with it. There is a preliminary storage of starch
in the liver, and of fat throughout the fat depots of the body. These
are so like what happens after part of the pituitary is removed, that
a comparison of the two becomes inevitable. Common to both conditions
is a drop in the rate of tissue combustion or metabolism, which can
be relieved by injection of an extract of the pituitary, a rise of
temperature occuring simultaneously. Moreover, examination of the
glands of internal secretion of hibernating species, like the
woodchuck, during the period of hibernation, shows changes in all of
them, but most marked in the pituitary, the shrunken cells staining
as if they too were asleep, or in a resting stage. The characteristic
alive qualities of these cells return, without relation to food
or climate, when the animal comes to in the spring, at the vernal
equinox. Hibernation may, perhaps, be put down to a seasonal wave of
inactivity of the pituitary gland.
Now winter sleep may be looked upon as an exaggeration of ordinary
night sleep, the latter differing from the former only in its brevity.
In the natural sleep of non-hibernating species there occurs, too,
a fall in temperature. Moreover, they all, even man, have a certain
capacity for winter sleep, as the experiences of travellers and
explorers in the arctic regions indicate. In certain parts of Russia,
where there is a scarcity of food during the winter months, the
peasants pass weeks at a time in a somnolent state, arousing once a
day for a scant meal. Just as the sex glands influence the body and
mind profoundly with a certain cyclic periodicity of activity and
inactivity (rut, heat, menstrual period and so on), which has been
demonstrated to have a very close functional relationship with the
pituitary, so sleep and hibernation will bear interpretation as
products of a temporary dormancy of the same gland. We have, then,
to set up in the place of Morpheus and Apollo, the new gods of the
internal secretion of a chemical-making bit of the brain, as an
explanation of the rhythms of sleep and wakefulness.
There are individuals who go about outside of hospital walls,
quasi-normally, who are semi-hibernators or partial hibernators, and
who are really in a state of subpituitarism. They are people who may
have something wrong or inferior with their pituitary, but not to the
extent of interference with their daily life. They go about with their
type stamped upon them for the seeing eye. The classical type is
obese, with fat distributed everywhere, but more so in the lower
abdomen and the lower extremities. They are slow and dull, and
sexually inactive, often impotent. They are sometimes tall, but most
often dwarfish, and may be subject to epileptic seizures. They recall
the picture of what happens to young dogs partially deprived of the
pituitary. Dickens delivered a perfect likeness of an extreme degree
of the condition in the Fat Boy of the "Pickwick Papers," whose
employment with Mr. Wardle consisted in alternate sleeping and eating.
WHEN THE PITUITARY OVERACTS
All grades of overaction of the pituitary exist. Then its peculiar
power to act as a stimulant to the growth of bone and the soft
supporting and connecting tissues like tendons and ligaments comes
into play. If the overaction or excess of secretion begins in
childhood or adolescence, that is, before puberty, there results a
great elongation of the bones, so that a giant is the consequence. Now
giants have always appealed to the imagination of the little man, and
have had all kinds of wonderful abilities ascribed to them by him. The
giants and ogres of folk-lore and fairy tales are favored with the
most extraordinary mental advantages. Direct and analytic acquaintance
with the giants of our own day, as well as a probing of their conduct
in the past, has shown that normal giants--persons of exceptional size
free from physical or mental deformities--are rare. There are people
with _hyper_-pituitarism who exhibit the highest mental powers. In
them is an increased activity of the posterior lobe in association
with enlargement and hyperfunction of the anterior, overgrowth is not
so marked, and the individual is lean and mentally acute. But the
ordinary giant is one in whom there is degeneration of the pituitary
after too much action of the anterior and too little of the posterior
glands. A tumor or disease process in the gland is most often
responsible.
If the overaction of the anterior happens after puberty, when the
long bones have set, and can not grow longer, a peculiar diffuse
enlargement of the individual occurs, especially of his hands and feet
and head. The nose, ears, lips and eyes get larger and coarser.
As these people are rather big and tall to begin with, the effect
produced is that of a heavy-jawed, burly, bulking person, with bushy
overhanging eyebrows, and an aggressive manner. For there is, too,
something distinctive about their mentality which has been as often
portrayed as those of the pathologic giant. Rabelais' most famous
character, Gargantua, belongs to the group. We recruit more
drum-majors than prime ministers from among these people. They
often suffer much from torturing boring headaches, and a consequent
despondency and feeling of hopelessness which colors gray the entire
spiritual spectrum. Up to a certain point these sufferers have a
remarkable alertness and capacity. When conscious of the malady, they
often meet it with a doggedly courageous optimism, which is another
characteristic, although women occasionally commit suicide.
In both the semi-hibernators who remind one of cattle, and in the
giant or acromegalic types who remind one of the anthropoid ape, there
develops a distinct diminution of sexual life. An abnormal process in
the anterior gland, whether of oversecretion or of undersecretion,
may interfere with the proper functioning of the posterior gland, the
secretion of which is tonic not only to the brain cells, but also to
the sex cells. Thus, young animals deprived of the pituitary will not,
if male, grow spermatozoa, nor ripe ova in the female. Moreover, the
feeding of pituitary increases sexual activity. In the case of hens,
this has been demonstrated to be about thirty per cent by a pretty
experiment. At a time of the year when eggs diminish, six hundred
and fifty-five hens laid two hundred and seventy-three eggs upon an
ordinary diet. When pituitary was added to their food for four days,
the number of eggs rose to three hundred and fifty-two, an increase of
seventy-nine. In addition, the fertility of the chicks born of these
eggs was augmented, especially if both parents had been fed on
pituitary. There are other aspects of the relation of the pituitary to
sex, which will be treated in another chapter.
THE BONY CRADLE OF THE PITUITARY
Always, in attempting to understand the pituitary, it is necessary to
remember that it is tightly packed in the bony cradle, the Turkish
Saddle or Sella Turcica. Should some stimulus, local, or in the blood,
arouse the gland to growth, a good deal will depend upon whether it
has room to grow in, or it will make room by eroding the bone. With
space for the formation of a large anterior and posterior pituitary
gland, there will be created the long, lean individual, with a
tendency to high blood pressure and sexual trends, great mental
activity, initiative, irritability and endurance. An outstanding trait
of these favorites of fortune is that they remain thin no matter how
much food they consume, and they have the best of appetites. They
often are subject to severe headaches because of intermittent swelling
of the gland against the bone of its container.
If the bony container is or becomes too small for its contents, it
is interesting that along with the other signs of pituitary
insufficiency, such as undersize, obesity, and asymmetry, there
developes conspicuous moral and intellectual inferiority. The
unfortunates suffer from compulsions and obsessions and lack
inhibitions. They are the pathological liars with little or no
initiative or conscience--amoral, not merely theoretically, but
instinctively and unconsciously, with all the certitude and perfection
of the unconscious accomplishment.
THYROID AND PITUITARY
The thyroid and the pituitary have often been compared. The anterior
gland and the thyroid arise from almost the same spot in the embryonic
oesophagus, the thyroid being an outgrowth in front, the anterior
pituitary an outgrowth behind of the same soil. They both control
growth marvelously, also the differentiation, the mass and intricacy
of the tissues. But they differ in the site of their control. The
thyroid bears more directly upon the inner and outer coverings of the
body, the skin, the skin glands and the hair, the mucous membranes,
and the irritability and the preparedness for response of the nerves.
The pituitary acts more upon the framework of the body, the skeleton
and the mechanical supports and movers. Bone and ligament, muscle
and tendon seem to be within its immediate sway. The secretion or
secretions of the pituitary diffuse directly into the fluid bathing
the nervous system, supplying beneficent stimulants and aiding in the
abstraction of harmful waste. So while the thyroid raises the energy
level of the brain, and the whole nervous system, as a byproduct of
its general awakening effect upon all the cells of the body, the
pituitary probably stimulates the brain cells more directly, perhaps
in the manner of caffeine or cocaine.
The difference between the thyroid and the pituitary might be put this
way: that while the thyroid increases energy evolution and so makes
available a greater supply of crude energy, by speeding up cellular
processes, the pituitary assists in energy transformation, in energy
expenditure and conversion, especially of the brain, and of the sexual
system. In short, the thyroid facilitates energy production, the
pituitary its consumption. The pituitary appears therefore as the
gland of continued effort. Hence fatigability, an inability to
maintain effort, is one of the prominent complaints when there is
destruction or an insufficiency of it for one reason or another. As
such, it contrasts with the glands of emergency effort, known as the
adrenals.
CHAPTER III
THE ADRENAL GLANDS, THE GONADS, AND THYMUS
Like the pituitary, each adrenal gland is a double gland, that is,
consists of two distinct portions, united together, one might say, by
the accident of birth. It would be confusing, however, to speak of
each as two glands, because there are, as a matter of fact, two
separate adrenal glands, one in the right side of the abdomen, and the
other in the left. Each gland is composite, or duplex. How the two
parts came to be united is a long story, interesting but too long to
be recounted here. In fishes they are apart and independent.
Each adrenal is a cocked hat shaped affair, astride the kidneys,
easily recognized because of its yellowish fatty color. Indeed, for
centuries the glands were not given a separate status as organs, but
were passed up as part of the fat ensheathing the kidney. In childhood
and youth, in common with the other glands, they are relatively larger
and more prominent than in the adult. Also, at every age, the amount
of blood passing through them is very large compared to their size.
Their tremendous importance in the body economy accounts for their
being so favored.
The two parts of which each gland is composed, are known as the cortex
or outer portion (literally the bark) and the medulla or inner portion
(literally the core). No clean-cut boundary sharply delimits the two,
as strands and peninsulas of tissue of one portion penetrate the
other. In the history of their development in the species and the
individual, and in their chemistry and function, a sharp difference
contrasts them.
In the embryo, the cortex is derived from the same patch that gives
rise to the sex organs, the ovaries in the female, and the testes in
the male, described as the germinal epithelium. How intimately the
two sets of glands are connected is neatly pointed by this fact of a
common ancestor. All vertebrates possess adrenal glands. In the lowest
of the vertebrates, Petromyzon, the two parts are distinct, the cells
of the cortex-to-be are situated in the walls of the kidney blood
vessels, projecting as peninsulas in the blood stream, the blood
sweeping over and past them. The medulla-to-be consists of cells
accompanying the vegetative nerves. Among reptiles, the two become
adjacent for the first time, and among birds one part occupies the
meshes of the other. The size of the cortex varies directly with the
sexuality and the pugnacity of the animal. The charging buffalo, for
example, owns a strikingly wide adrenal cortex. The fleeing rabbit,
on the other hand, is conspicuous for a narrow strip of cortex in its
adrenal. Human beings possess a cortex larger than that of any other
animal.
No definite chemical substance has as yet been isolated from the
cortex. That remains a problem for the investigator of the future. But
certain observations, especially concerning the relation between
the development and behaviour of the so-called secondary sex
characteristics, those qualities of skin, hair and fat distribution,
physical configuration and mental attitudes, which distinguish the
sexes, and the condition of the gland, indicate clearly that an
internal secretion will be isolated, and that it will in its activity
furnish certain predictable features.
Three different layers of cells, arranged in strings, that
interpenetrate to form a network directly bathed by blood, that breaks
in upon them from _open_ blood vessels, compose the cortex. Most
remarkable is this method of blood supply for it is exceedingly common
among the invertebrates and rare among the vertebrates.
In certain disturbances of these glands, especially when there are
tumors, which supply a massive dose of the secretion to the blood
presumably, peculiar sex phenomena and general developmental anomalies
and irregularities are produced. If the disease be present in the
fetus, taking hold before birth, and so brought into the world with
the child, there evolves the condition of pseudo-hermaphroditism. The
individual, if a female, presents to a greater or less extent the
external habits and character of the other sex. So that she is
actually taken for a man, although the primary sex organs are ovaries,
often not discovered to be such except when examined after an
operation or death. How closely such an occurrence touches upon the
problems of sex inversion and perversion comes at once to mind.
If the process involving the adrenal cortex attacks it after birth,
the symmetrical correspondence and harmony of the primary sex organs
and the secondary sex characters are not affected. But there follows
a curious hastening of the ripening of body and mind summed up in the
word puberty, a precocious puberty, with the most startling effects.
A little girl of 2, 3, or 4 years of age perhaps will come to exhibit
the growth and appearance of a girl of 14. She begins to menstruate,
her breasts swell, she shoots up in height and weight, sprouts the
hair distribution of the adult, and the mentality of the adolescent,
restless, acquiring, doubting, emerge. A tot bewitched into puberty!
A boy of six or seven may suddenly, in the course of a few weeks or
months, become a little man, robust, rather short and stocky, but
moustached, with the muscular strength and sexual powers of a man and
thinking as a man. It is all as if into some fermentable medium or
solution a little yeast were dropped that changed the quiet calm of
its surface into a bubbling, effervescing revolution. It suggests at
once that maturation, the transformation of the child into the man or
woman, must be due to the pouring into the blood and the body fluids
of some substance which acts like the yeast in the fermentable
solution. The adrenal cortex is one source of the maturity-producing
internal secretions.
If trouble in the adrenal cortex starts after puberty, phenomena of
the same type, but of a different order, exhibit themselves. A woman,
say in the thirties, becomes thus afflicted. Slowly or quickly her
body will be covered by an abundant growth of hair, more or less of a
beard and moustache appear upon the face, her voice will become deep
and penetrating, her muscles will harden, and she will show a capacity
for hard physical labor. Sexually she appears to be made over,
masculinity now predominates in her make-up. Virilism is the name by
which the French in particular have popularized the knowledge of the
condition. Virilists have to shave or be shaved regularly and are not
bothered in the least by the cares, responsibilities, jealousies and
anxieties of personal beauty, for the change in their spirituality
makes them immune to the preoccupations of the feminine. The cause of
such a transformation in a previously entirely normal woman has been
found to be a tumor of the adrenal cortex.
But not only is sexuality, and the conduct of the secondary sex
characters, connected with the adventures of the adrenal cortex. The
development of the master tissues of the body, the brain, the pride
and darling of evolution, is in some subtle way correlated with
it. The adrenal cortex contains more of the phosphorus-containing
substances of the general nature of those found in the central nervous
system than any other gland or non-nervous tissues in the body. During
human intrauterine life the adrenal glands are large and conspicuous,
in the first half of the second month being twice as large as the
kidneys. Most of this relatively huge size, which happens in the human
alone, and not in other animals, is due to enlargement of the cortex.
Should this preponderance of the cortex over the medullary portion not
occur in the human, that is, if the proportions remain like those of
other animals, the brain fails to develop properly, or an entirely
brainless monster is generated. The human brain, therefore, probably
owes its superiority over the animal brain, to the adrenal cortex, in
development anyhow. The growth of the brain cells, their number and
complexity is thus controlled by the adrenal cortex.
Besides its action upon the sex cells and the brain cells, the
internal secretion of the adrenal cortex acts upon the pigment cells
of the skin, blunting their sensitiveness to light. In degeneration
of the interior of the gland, which destroys the medulla, but not the
cortex, the color of the skin is left unmodified. If, however, the
cortex is invaded, as happens most often in the classical tuberculosis
of the adrenals which drew the attention of the Englishman Addison
to them, then a darkening of the skin, which may go on to a negroid
bronzing, follows. That means an increased sensitiveness of the
pigment cells of the skin to light. Skin color control may therefore
be looked upon as an adrenal cortex function.
So much is known about the adrenal cortex. Upon the medulla, the
interior gland of the gland, there has been lavished an amount of
attention beside which the cortex is to be classed as a neglected
wall-flower. Nearly everything that possibly could be determined
about an internal secretion has in its case been settled or plausibly
guessed at. The cells manufacturing the secretion, its exact chemistry
and function, its action upon the blood, the liver and spleen, the
heart and lungs, the brain and nervous system, have been minutely
investigated, studied and charted. Its source in the food, its fate in
the body, its place in the history of the individual and the species,
its importance as a weapon in the struggle for existence, and the
survival of the fittest have been made the subject of an astonishing
number of researches, considering the short period of scarce three
decades that intensive science has centered its barrage upon it.
In the first place, the medulla contains numerous nerve cells,
belonging to the vegetative, also called the sympathetic nervous
system. But these nerve cells are merely minor notes of the symphony.
The motif is settled by a majority of large, granular cells, which
stain a distinctive yellowish-brown when the gland is fixed in a
solution of bichromate of potash. All chromium salts, in fact, stain
the therefore labelled chromaffin cells. The characteristic staining
power appears to be dependent upon, or correlated with, the presence
of the internal secretion of the medulla of the adrenal, adrenalin.
For the content of adrenalin, as calculated chemically, and the
depth of stain as seen under the microscope, rise and fall together.
Chromaffin reaction and adrenalin content go together. The poisonous
skin glands of the toad have been found to give a marked chromaffin
reaction, and to contain a large amount of adrenalin. Other masses
of cells in the human body, especially along the course of the
sympathetic nervous system, have been shown to give the reaction and
to contain adrenalin.
The erratic Brown-Sequard pounded and hammered away for more than
thirty years on the importance to life of the adrenal glands, since
death occurred so quickly after their removal. But it was not until
Schaefer, the Scotch physiologist, (who has done more than any other
living man to stimulate study of the internal secretions) found that
an extract of them, when injected into a vein, produced a remarkable
though temporary rise of the blood pressure, that a real enthusiasm
for its investigation was generated. As the upshot, a number of other
significant properties besides the first of blood-pressure raising,
have been put down to its credit. Chemical tests demonstrated that
it originated in the medulla. The exact amount of it present in the
medulla, in the blood issuing from the adrenals and in the circulation
in general have been determined. The concentration in the blood is
about one part in twenty million, while there is about a hundred
thousand times as much stored in the gland as reserve. In infections
and intoxications, after muscular exertion, and with profound
emotions, there is a decrease of it in the gland and an increase in
the blood. Pain and excitement, especially fear and rage, will bring
about its discharge from the gland. With its entry into the blood,
there is a tremendous heightening of the tone, a _tensing_, of the
nervous system. The nerve cells become more sensitive to stimuli,
more sugar is poured into the blood from the liver, more red blood
corpuscles are squeezed into the circulation from the blood lakes of
the liver and spleen. There is a redistribution of the whole blood
mass, a good deal of it being withdrawn from the internal viscera, and
hurried to the skeleton muscles and the brain. The heart beats more
strongly, the eye sees more clearly, the ear hears more distinctly,
and the breathing is more rapid. The temperature rises, the hair of
the head and the body becomes erect, the skin gets moist and greasy.
It will help a fatigued muscle to regain its normal tone. In short, it
has a reinforcing action upon the nutritive properties of the blood,
the tone of the muscles, and the activity of the brain and the
vegetative nerves.
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.
How remarkably these interstitial cells influence the entire structure
and vitality of the organism is indicated by these facts. How much
they have to do with sexual impulses, sexual excitement, and sexual
desire, what the Freudians have popularized as the libido, and how
subtly they act upon the coming and duration of adolescence and
maturity, as well as sexual precocity and peversions, we shall
consider in a later chapter. But it is enough now to remember that
these interstitial glands are the primary dictators of the genital
sense and flair of the individual. In any attempt at measurement of
men and women, the quality and quantity of the internal secretion
of the interstitial cells must be respected as a fundamental
consideration. The womanly woman and the manly man, those ideals of
the Victorians, which crumbled before the attack of the Ibsenites,
Strindbergians and Shavians in the nineties, but which must be
recognized as quite valid biologically, are the masterpieces of these
interstitial cells when in their perfection. They are such solely
because of the right concentration in the blood of the substances
manufactured not only by these cells, but by all the glands of
internal secretion. For it cannot be repeated and emphasized too often
that the interstitial cells of the sex glands are most sensitive to
all kinds of other influences, and, in particular, the other internal
secretory organs. They may indeed be watched as an index scale or
barometer of the general tone of the whole internal secretion system.
Sex variations offer a variety of clues to variations, disturbances,
predominances and abnormalities in all the components of the ductless
gland association.
To take a single instance, the development of the long bones is
dependent upon the handling of food lime by the body. Eunuchs and
eunuchoids, that is, individuals with insufficient internal secretion
of the interstitial cells, have longer bones and more fragile bones
than the normal. Vice versa, those with an excess of the secretion
have shorter and thicker bones. The earlier the onset of menstruation,
which means puberty, the shorter the extremities, as the action of the
internal secretion of the ovaries closes the story of the growth of
the long bones.
The ovaries are a most important factor in the regulation of the power
of the organism to keep lime in the bones. If they over-secrete in an
excess which cannot be taken care of by the other glands of internal
secretion, the body loses lime, a softening and curving of the bones
occurs, and the most horrible deformities and tortures for the
sufferer. Taking out the ovaries has cured some of the afflicted.
Administration of the antagonizing gland extracts has helped others.
An Italian, Bossi, in 1907, used adrenal gland curatively. More
recently, a British student of the subject, Blair Bell, was given the
direction of the treatment, at long range, of a number of cases in
India, the land of chronic pregnancy with insufficient food, and
consequent oversecretion of the ovaries, with the typical softening of
the bones. At his suggestion pituitary was used successfully.
Some of the glands of internal secretion act as accelerators to the
sex glands. Others act as retarding antagonists. Among the most
important of the latter is
THE THYMUS
The thymus is the gland which dominates childhood. It appears to do so
by inhibiting the activity of the testes or ovaries. Castration causes
a persistent growth and retarded atrophy of the thymus. Removal of the
thymus hastens the development of the gonads.
Situated in the chest, astride the windpipe, it descends and covers
over the upper portion of the heart, overlapping the great vessels
at the base of the heart. It is a brownish red mass, which when cut
presents the spongy effect of a sweetbread. The more intimate view
of detail revealed by the higher powers of the microscope shows
conglomerations of the white cells of the blood known as lymphocytes.
But scattered through the substance of the gland, between these
lymphocytes, like the interstitial cells of the sex glands placed
between the sex cells, are peculiarly staining cells in whorls.
Of which there are many more in the thymus of embryonic and early
postnatal life, known after their discoverer as Hassal's Corpuscles.
They are believed by some to elaborate the specific internal secretion
of the thymus. Present in all vertebrates, there seems to be more of
it in the carnivora than in the herbivora, like the thyroid.
Concerning the exact function of the thymus, we are a good deal at
sea. The latest opinion about the results of extirpation even in young
and growing animals is that they are nil. Yet there is a certain
justification for proclaiming the thymus the gland of childhood, the
gland which keeps children childish and sometimes makes children out
of grown-ups. There is a quantity of data for that proposition. In
the first place, the curve of rise of growth of the gland seems to
coincide with the period of childhood, the curve of its decline with
the period of adolescence and the rise of the sex glands. In the
past, it was accepted, that with puberty the thymus atrophied and
was replaced by some sort of fatty tissue. Nowadays, it is held that
secretion cells persist throughout life. When the extent of this
persistence is too great, the gland being from five to ten times as
large as the normal, a number of other features become prominent to
make the extraordinary individual, the status lymphaticus, who amid
the hazards of life will react in an extraordinary way. He will be
taken up in the consideration of internal secretion personalities.
Then there are the varied and remarkable phenomena of thymus
enlargement and hyperactivity in childhood itself. When an enlarged
thymus is present in an infant, the initiation of breathing in the
new-born, the introduction of the newcomer to the oxygen of the air,
may be an exceedingly prolonged, difficult, matter. Such a baby is
said to be born blue, and the breathing may be stridorous for days,
becoming normal for a time, to be followed later by spells of trouble
in breathing, breathlessness or breathlessness with blueness, and
threatened extinction. Sometimes these spells come out of a clear
sky in an apparently healthy child. That some poison, probably an
oversecretion of the thymus, is responsible is shown by the relief
obtainable by X-ray shrinkage of the gland, or the surgical removal of
a part of it.
Moreover, the gland is influenced by and influences the factors
of body weight and growth with an extreme readiness and lability.
Deficient general undernutrition leads to rapid decline in its weight.
Back in 1858, the pioneer student of the thymus, Friedleben, declared
that the size and condition of the thymus is an index to be the state
of nutrition of the body. Underfeeding for four weeks will reduce it
to one thirtieth the normal. It seems to act as a storage and reserve
organ, affording some protection against the limitation of growth by
lack of food material. In exhausting or wasting disease, the weight
of the gland sinks much more quickly than other glands. Scattered
instances have been reported of children growing, putting on inches in
height and expanding mentally, when thymus was fed to them, in whom
every other measure previously tried had failed. A French study of
over four hundred idiotic children with normal thyroids reported that
over three fourths had no thymus at all. Everything points to the most
direct and close relation between the gland and nutrition and growth,
but with nothing tangibly definite like our knowledge of the thyroid
and the pituitary.
There is evidence that the thymus is involved in the health and
efficiency of muscle cells and muscularity. Certain tumors of the
thymus, presumably destructive of the gland substance proper, and
thus cutting off its secretion, are accompanied by a singular muscle
weakness and atrophy of the muscle cells, entirely out of proportion
to the general damage suffered by the other cells of the body when
affected by the poison of a malignant growth. Also, the thymus has
been discovered diseased in certain mysterious progressive muscular
wastings. A remarkable fatigability of muscles, which appears after
the slightest exertion, is a feature. The feeding of thymus has caused
muscle cramps which apparently depends upon an increased excitability
of the muscle nerve endings.
Feeding of thymus to some of the lower creatures of the animal kingdom
will completely hold up differentiation. Take the unfolding of the
specialized tissues and organs which transform the tadpole into the
frog and the chrysalis into the butterfly. A tadpole kept supplied
with enough thymus in a nutrient medium will swell into an
extraordinary giant tadpole, but will not change into a frog.
Recently, this experiment has been contradicted. Yet this effect
corresponds to the conception of its importance in childhood as a
retardant of precocity, physical and mental. Clinical observations
emphasize that in childhood it is the chief brake upon the other
glands of internal secretion which would hasten development and
differentiation, checking them perhaps for a given time and so
profoundly influencing growth.
THE PINEAL
The pineal is another gland which has been credited with similar
abilities and a like holding-the-reins-tight-in-childhood function
among the cells. Like the thymus, it has been supposed one of the
distinctive organs of childhood and to die with it. Generations of
anatomists solemnly asserted, repeating each other's mistakes with the
aplomb of the historians who declare that history repeats itself, that
the pineal body was a useless, wastefully space consuming vestige of a
once important structure. That was the view in that century of grandly
inaccurate assertions, the nineteenth. Not that they relegated it with
that statement to the limbo of the dull and the uninteresting. Quite
the contrary. They conferred upon it a distinguished romance and
mystery by identifying it as the last heir and vestigial remnant of
a third eye, situated in the back of the head, which may still be
observed in certain reptiles. Imagine it! Somewhere, stuck away in a
cranny of the floor of your head and mine, is this descendant of an
organ that once sparkled and shone, wept and glared, took in the stars
and hawks and eagles, and now is condemned to eternal darkness and an
ineffectual sandiness. Today, we have not discarded that view of its
history, but we know a little more regarding its composition and
function.
What and where is the romantic object? It is a cone-shaped bit of
tissue hidden away at the base of the brain in a tiny cave behind
and above its larger colleague, the pituitary. Microscopic scrutiny
reveals that it is made up in part of nerve cells containing a pigment
similar to that present in the cells of the retina, thus clinching the
argument for its ancient function as an eye. But the outstanding and
specifically glandular cells are large secreting affairs, which too
reach back to the tidewater days of our vertebrate ancestors, when
Eurypterus and other Crustaceans were engrossed with the fundamental
problems of brain versus belly. Besides these, there are the singular
masses upon which has been fastened the unnecessarily opprobious
epithet of brain sand. These, noted and commented upon from the
earliest times, consist of collections of crystals of lime salts,
sometimes small, lying about in discrete irregular masses, and
sometimes grouped into larger mulberry-like concretions, varying
much in size. These brain sand particles have become of practical
importance in the detection of pineal disease because they, like all
lime salts, will stop the X-rays, and so can be photographed.
For a long time, indeed up to scarcely more than a few decades or so
ago, the pineal was believed to have no present function at all, or at
least no ascertainable or accessible duty in the body economy. That
it might perhaps be, in a sense, a gland of internal secretion was
a despised theory. Then a classic case, the most extraordinary and
curiosity-piquing sort of case, with symptoms involving the pineal
gland, in a boy, was reported by the German neurologist, Von Hochwart.
That boy provoked a little army of researches. He came to the clinic
complaining about his eyes and other troubles which pointed pretty
definitely to a brain tumor as the diagnosis to pigeon-hole him.
Nothing extraordinary about him in that respect. But the story told by
his parents was quite extraordinary, even to the jaded palate of the
clinic professor and his assistants. They said that he was a little
over five years old, a statement conclusively proved correct at his
death. Up to the time at which his illness began, he had been quite
normal in size, intelligence and interests. But with the onset of his
misfortune, he had begun to grow, and rapidly until now he looked
and corresponded in all measurements to a normal boy of twelve or
thirteen. Hair developed all over his skin, most prominently and
abundantly in the typically hairy places of adults. His voice became
low-pitched, and most remarkable of all, his sexuality and mentality
precocious. He became capable of true sexual life and is said to have
asked many questions about the fate and condition of the soul after
death. On one occasion he remarked reflectively: "It is odd how much
better I feel when I let other children play with my toys than when I
play with them myself." Other statements attributed to him imply the
most astounding maturity of thought and mental process. Headaches
finally came, and he died about four weeks later. The cause of the
whole bizarre tragedy was found to be a tumor of the pineal gland.
As has happened before in medical history, no sooner was the one
prodigy reported, than a score of others of the same ilk sprang into
the limelight. Cases of precocious genital development, especially,
some of them occurring as early as the second year of life, were
linked with them. It is an interesting point to be noted that in
these, as in those started by an overaction of the adrenal cortex, it
is premature masculinity that is stimulated. The adrenal cortex must
be classed as a gland of masculinity. The pineal possibly acts as a
brake upon the adrenal cortex.
Very soon after the report of Von Hochwart's prodigy appeared, an
experimental research on the pineal was begun in New York. The pineal
glands of a number of young bullocks were obtained and used for
feeding, to see whether an overaction of the internal secretion
could be produced. Guinea pigs, kittens and rabbits were used. The
experiments covered about two years in time. Of a dozen small
kittens, the subjects outgrew the controls rapidly in activity, size,
intelligence, and resistance to intercurrent disease. Of ten small
rabbits, the controls weighed about a third less than the subjects,
which were strikingly clean, active, fat and salacious.
Feeding of the gland was then extended to a particular class of
defective children, children with well-shaped heads, normal eyes,
symmetrically functioning limbs, excellent digestion, strong muscles
and generally, normal, sometimes rapid growth. It is to them,
particularly when mental normality has progressed up to the eighth,
tenth or twelfth year and stopped, that the term "moron" has been
applied. They have been a hopeless lot, belonging to the limbo of the
incurables. Moreover, they, emphatically the physically normal ones,
differ from one another enormously in the extent to which mental
operations are possible. As all transitions and degrees exist, no
definite classification and subdivision of them has been made. Yet
ever since the cretin, once looked upon as an eternally damned
defective, was transformed by thyroid feeding into an apparently
normal being, there has been no dearth of effort to find the right
kind of internal secretion to fit their desperate situations, but in
vain. In defectives with definitely, organically damaged brains,
no result of course was to be expected. In those of any class over
fifteen, no response has been elicited by feeding pineal gland. In the
others the results have been contradictory.
A set of observations have related the pineal to muscle function,
inviting comparison of it with the thymus. There is a singular muscle
shrinking and deforming disease, known as progressive muscular
dystrophy, hitherto a complete and unsolved mystery. Newer studies
of the pineal in this disease during life by means of the X-ray have
shown it calcified, that is, buried in lime salts, which signifies put
out of business. Recently thus another hint as to its function has
been ferreted out.
The tadpole as a reagent to test out the growth effects of different
glands of internal secretion has also been employed for the pineal.
Ten-day-old tadpoles fed on pineal present a marked translucency of
the skin due to a retraction of the skin pigment cells. Now without a
doubt a number of as yet unknown growth and metabolic effects follow
exposure of the body to the complete gamut of light rays. The
interesting suggestion follows that the pineal influences the body by
varying the degree of light ray reaction.
The pineal, the ghost of a once important third eye at the back of
our heads, still harks back in its function to a regulation of our
susceptibility to light, and its effect upon sex and brain. So it
becomes one of the significant regulators of development, with an
indirect hastening or retardation of puberty and maturity according
as it works in excess, or too indolently. It appears thus the blood
brother of the adrenal cortex which also influences the skin pigment
and so susceptibility of the organism to light, brain growth and sex
ripening. It is interesting that Descartes, in 1628, considered the
pineal the seat of the soul.
THE PARATHYROIDS
Sometimes imbedded within the substance of the thyroid in the neck,
sometimes placed directly behind it upon the windpipe, are four tiny
glands, each about the size of a wheat seed, the parathyroids. For
long they were swamped in the nearness of their great neighbor, and
considered merely a variable part of it. There are some who contend
that even today. But it has been proven that they are separate,
individual glands, with a structure and function of their own, and a
definite importance to the body economy.
On the animal family tree they appear early, contemporaneously with
the thyroids. In the embryo they develop from about the same sites.
And very often they look very much alike under the microscope,
especially when the cells are in certain quiescent stage of secretion.
Yet they are wholly independent in nature, activity and business.
First experimenters upon the effects of removal of the thyroid were
confused by contradictory findings with different animals because in
some they would take out the parathyroids at the same time without
knowing it, and in others they would not. That possibility suggested,
more careful dissectors accomplished the job of extirpating the
thyroid while leaving the parathyroids intact and vice versa. In
consequence some definite information about the parathyroids is
available, even though their internal secretion has never been
isolated, or its existence established as more than an inference.
When the parathyroids are removed, an astounding increase in the
excitability of the nerves follow. It is as if the animal were
thoroughly poisoned with strychnine. The slightest stimulus will make
him jump, or throw him into a spasm. When the excitability of the
nerves is measured by an electrical instrument it is found augmented
by from five hundred to one thousand per cent. The reflexes, those
automatic responses of brain and spinal cord to certain stimuli and
situations, become enormously sensitive, so that merely letting the
light into a darkened room will make the subject of the experiment go
into a series of convulsions.
On the chemical side, an explanation for these nervous phenomena has
been advanced. Lime in the blood and cells appears to be necessary in
a number of ways. In the making of bone and teeth, in the coagulation
of the blood, in the keeping of fluid within the blood vessels, and
in maintaining the tone of the nerves, it plays a major role. Now the
parathyroids, among all the glands of internal secretion, seem to act
as the prime regulators of the amount of lime held within the blood
and cells. For when the parathyroids have been completely and
aseptically excised, without injuring any other organ, immediately the
body begins to lose lime. Something has gone out of it that helped
it to bind lime, and without that essential something, the internal
secretion presumably of the parathyroids, the lime departs. As
a conspicuous consequence the teeth fail to develop properly,
particularly as to their enamel, for which lime is an essential
constituent. Hair is lost, there is a general wasting, the nails get
brittle, and the bones soften, and the animal dies. Supplying lime
directly, particularly by direct injection into the blood, will
relieve the symptoms.
In man, a condition of nervous over-excitability has been described
as tetany. It occurs most often in the young, the pregnant, or in
vomiting after operations. All sorts of tests have related the malady
to the phenomena succeeding parathyroid deprivation, and they are now
looked upon as aspects of it. Individuals have been reported suffering
from an insufficiency of the internal secretion of parathyroids,
with a sudden extreme depression, nervousness and restlessness, an
inability to sleep or sit still, and a tremulous handwriting. Such
reports round out the evidence for the importance of the parathyroids
in an understanding of the factors which control growth, especially
as regards lime utilization, for without lime properly handled no
building of cells is possible. Also the parathyroids are necessary to
a steadiness of muscle and nerve.
THE PANCREAS
The business of the parathyroids concerns the keeping of lime in the
body. Another gland, the pancreas or sweetbreads, this time within the
abdomen, a close neighbor of the solar plexus, alias the abdominal
brain, is occupied with holding and hoarding sugar in the body,
particularly in the liver, the great sugar warehouse. This matter
of retaining sugar and controlling its output is one of the utmost
significance for growth and metabolism, the resistance to infections,
the response to emergency situations, and in general to the
mobilization of energy for physical and mental purposes. For without
sugar sufficiently at hand for the cells, no muscle work or nerve
work, the essentials of the struggle for existence, are possible.
The pancreas is an organ with both an internal and external secretion.
The external secretion, long known, evolved by the major portion of
the gland, is poured into the small intestine to play the star in
digestion. Scattered here and there among the definitely glandular
cell groups creating the external secretion are smaller collections of
cells, called the islets of Langerhans, which have been demonstrated
to elaborate the internal secretion. There are about a million of
these islands in each gland. The hormone has been called insuline.
Unlike most of the glands with a double secretion in which the
internal is absolutely independent, and so to speak, unconscious of
the external, these two of the pancreas are often disturbed together,
perhaps because trouble easily hits them both together.
Quite the most well-known disease due to disturbed internal secretory
function of the pancreas is diabetes. An enormous amount of work has
been spent upon the various aspects of it as a mystery. Hundreds of
papers in a dozen languages upon the subject are in existence. In a
nutshell, they have established pretty well that diabetes is a disease
in which there is an excess of sugar in the blood and urine because of
an insufficient amount of the secretion of the islands of Langerhans
in the pancreas. Removal of the pancreas makes the body, essentially
the liver, unable to retain sugar, as well as unable to burn up sugar
for energy. The situation is comparable to a locomotive with its coal
bins leaking, and the coal itself acting as if made of slate or some
equally uncombustible or only partially combustible material.
The control of sugar mobilization from the liver, where it is stored
as glycogen or animal starch, is divided between the pancreas and
the adrenals, the pancreas acting as the brake, the adrenals as the
accelerator of the mechanism. Adrenal and pancreas are therefore
direct antagonists, the pans of the scale which represents sugar
equilibrium in the organism. Diabetes may be regarded as a disturbance
of the adrenal-pancreas balance, assisted by events which produce
adrenal overwork like great or prolonged emotion, or by strain of the
pancreas, effected by over-eating for example.
There are other minor glands of internal secretions. But those
considered are by far the most important and the most recently
explored. In a summary, one would classify them as follows:
_Name Secretion Function_
1. Thyroid Thyroxin Gland of energy production
Controller of growth
of specialized organs
and tissues--brain
and sex
2. Pituitary-- Gland of energy consumption
and utilization--continued
effort
anterior Unknown Growth of skeleton and
supporting tissues
posterior Pituitrin Nerve cell and involuntary
muscle cell, brain and sex tone
3. Adrenals The Gland of Combat
cortex Unknown a. Brain growth--tone
development of
sex glands
medulla Adrenalin b. Energy for emergency
situations
4. Pineal Unknown a. Brain and sex development
b. Adolescence and puberty
c. Light and maturity
5. Thymus Unknown Gland of Childhood
6. Interstitial Testes in male Glands of secondary
glands of Ovaries in female Sex traits
7. Parathyroids Unknown a. Controllers of lime
metabolism
b. Excitability of
muscle and nerve
8. Pancreas Insuline Controller of sugar
metabolism
CHAPTER IV
THE GLANDS AS AN INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATE
Now in considering each gland of internal secretion as a separate
entity, and labelling it with certain properties and actions, we of
course commit the usual sin of the intellect: the sin of abstraction
and isolation of its material. This crime of analysis the intellect
commits every day in the search for truth. Before its dissection, it
seems to have to dip the elusive article in a fixative, and bottle it
in a vacuum.
Yet nothing in reality is more of a changing flux than the body in all
of its parts and tissues and organs. And of all these, the glands of
internal secretion stand out as the most susceptible to change. Made
to react to stimuli of offense and defense, instantaneously responsive
to situations involving energy exchanges and protective reflexes,
they are never for any minute the same or alone. They never function
separately. Each influences the other in a communicating chain. Let
one be disturbed, and all the others will feel the impact of the
disturbance and vibrate with it.
Any break in the somatic or psychic equilibrium, a blow or an
infection, or a startling thing seen, or a worrisome thought felt,
will start a process going. This will only wind up when every gland
has been somehow touched, and a final equilibrium reestablished. The
thyroid, maybe, was first excited, and then in turn the adrenals, with
a boomerang reinforcing effect upon the thyroid, and at the same time
a stimulating effect upon the pituitary. Each gland is thus influenced
and influencing, agent and reagent in the complex adjustments of the
organism.
ENDOCRINE CO-OPERATIONS
The body-mind is a perfect corporation. Not quite perfect, for
continually there arise little insurgencies, inadequacies and
frictions to which in time it will succumb. Yet, in the efficiency of
its co-operations, and in the co-ordination of the needs and supplies
of producer, middle man, and consumer, there is no one of the great
organizations of the captains of industry which can for a moment
approach it.
Of this corporation the glands of internal secretion are the
directors. But the huge corporation, not to topple over with its own
unwieldy size, must be composed of smaller units, each within itself
a corporation, and governed by a directorate. There are, in the
corporation-organism, different departments and bureaus, subdivisions
of function, which constitute the smaller corporations within the
larger corporation. These subsidiary companies have their own glands
of internal secretion as their directors.
Thus, the growth of the brain is presided over by the adrenal cortex,
the thyroid, the thymus and the pituitary. They determine the size of
the brain, the number of its cells, the complexity of its convolutions
and the speed of its chemistry, which means the speed of thought and
memory and imagination. As its directorate, therefore, they may be
entitled. The disturbance of one of them means the disturbance of all
of them, and a consequent deleterious effect upon the brain. Now take
the burning up of sugar in the organism, the great material source
of energy, which is controlled by the pancreas, the adrenals and
the liver, the thyroid and the pituitary. Together they form the
directorate of sugar metabolism. But, as is evident from a glance at
the membership of the growth directorate, and comparing it with the
directorate of sugar metabolism, there are some members who are
present on both boards. An infection, an illness, an ailment, an
exaltation or intoxication of such members will produce reverberations
in both directorates. A disturbance of sugar metabolism might then
cause a disturbance of growth. The advantages and disadvantages
are before us of having, in the glands of internal secretion, an
interlocking directorate, rulers over all the varied and manifold
activities of the organism.
Behind the body, and behind the mind is this board of governors.
Indeed, from the administrative and legislative points of view, the
body-mind may be said to be governed by the House of Glands. It is the
invisible committee behind the throne. Upon the throne is what? Man,
the most baffling of complexities. Man who is not a mind, but owns a
mind--Man who is not a body, but possesses a body, just as he might
have a motor car, a fortune or a calamity. Back of all his daily
activities, behind the life of body-mind is the mysterious unique
individuality, the Ego, the Psyche or the Soul. Lately, a competitor
with these ancient and honorable terms has come upon the scene as the
Subconscious. In that darkened No Man's Land is determined a man's
destiny. The endocrine association stands out as at least the most
important physical determinant of the states and processes of the
subconscious.
ANTAGONISMS AND CO-OPERATIONS
As within a corporation there are factions and cliques, influences
that always work together, and forces that are always pulling in
opposite directions, so within the interlocking directorate of the
ductless glands there are antagonisms and inhibitions, co-operations
and compensations. One gland will assist the action of another's
secretion with its own, or will in turn be stimulated to secrete by
it. Another will throw out its secretion in order to neutralize the
effects produced. Or its own activity will be depressed or completely
inhibited by it. Thus the pituitary arouses the interstitial glands
and vice versa, whereas the pancreas and the thyroid are mutually
inhibitory. Indeed, whole systems of glands may work in unison, or be
pitted against each other in certain situations, especially when
the organism is subjected to conflicting impulses with the clash
of opposing instincts, like fear and anger. In general there is
reciprocity and team work among the internal secretions.
A certain minimum amount of each must be present if life is to
continue along the normal lines. Whether there is to be an excess
of any one secretion above this minimum, or a deficiency below it,
decides the fate of the individual. If there is deficiency of one, the
other members of the directorate attempt to make up for what has been
lost, and to carry on its work by an extra effort, to substitute. Or,
released from the discipline of the deficient member, or the necessity
for antagonizing it, they may be released from its stimulus to
secrete, and produce less of their own specific secretion. A general
reaction all along the line will accompany overaction, oversecretion,
of one gland. Due to consequent stimulations and depressions of
other glands, some may be excited by the event to overwork--some to
assist--others, to act as antidote for--the excess secretion, while
still others, relieved of a burden, do not have to supply as much of
their quota under the circumstances and so shut down, or limit their
output.
It is important to get clearly in mind these subtle inter-reactions of
the different ductless glands. They may be antagonistic in their end
effects because of the opposed functions of the nerves or organs
stimulated. There are inhibitions and restraints produced when a gland
will send out its secretions to stop another gland secreting. There
are compensations resulting when because of insufficiency of a gland,
others will endeavour, by manufacturing more of their own secretion,
to compensate for the loss. There are mutual co-operations,
partnerships, when a gland will oversecrete to assist another, or in
response to another which is also oversecreting. There are losses
of balance, so that when one gland ceases secreting, another will
simultaneously or soon after. Normal secretion, oversecretion or
undersecretion are thus adjusted, but leave a train of after effects.
So with loss or insufficiency of the thyroid, there may be pituitary
overgrowth, because the pituitary may act as vicar for the thyroid.
The thyroid and thymus are antagonistic, for the thyroid hastens
differentiation, puberty and the coming of sexual maturity, while the
thymus delays and retards them and prolongs the period of childhood.
The thyroid and the pancreas are antagonists, for when the thyroid
has been excised, the pancreas appear no longer necessary to act as a
break upon the mechanism of sugar liberation into the blood from
the liver. The thyroid stimulates the interstitial glands, for
menstruation and pregnancy are impossible with no thyroid or an
insufficient thyroid. Removal of the pituitary makes the thymus shrink
because the restraining influence of the latter is no longer needed.
But there is an enlargement of the thyroid to compensate. In castrates
there is an increase in the size and number of the cells of the
anterior pituitary, again a compensation or substitution effect. The
pituitary and the adrenal cortex are mutually assistant, alike in
their influence upon the tone of the brain and sex cells.
THE KINETIC SYSTEM
So there are combinations of glands to assist or restrain others, or
to control a body function, or to determine the domination or abeyance
of an instinct. One such has been named the kinetic system because it
comes into play in situations which demand prompt adaptation without
hesitancy, and a consequent immediate transformation of static or
stored energy into kinetic or active energy. According to this
conception the brain, the adrenals, the liver, the thyroid and the
muscles together constitute a machine very much like an automobile.
The self-starter of the machine is the brain, with storage battery
(composed of stored past memories) and ignition combined. The thing
seen without, or the idea felt within, act as the initial sparks,
while the adrenals, as the carburetors, permit the freer flow of fuel,
sugar, from the liver. The thyroid works as the accelerator, the
original impulse finally landing upon muscles keyed up and supplied
with food to meet the situation, be it that of removing a poison,
removing an aggressor (attack) or removing the individual himself
(running away). When one is exhausted by exertion and emotion, injury,
intoxication or infection, it is these members of the kinetic system,
the brain, the adrenals, thyroid and liver, which are exhausted.
Exhaustion diminishes when the activity of the brain is diminished by
anesthetics, and cured when it is abolished by sleep.
If the adrenal gland may be called the Gland of Emergency energy, the
Kinetic System is entitled to the name of Council of Emergency Defense
for the organism. The Kinetic Drive is the name that has been given to
the whole system at work. It is one of the best examples we have of
inter-glandular co-operations and reactions in reply to the threat of
danger or the hint of pleasure.
THE CHECK AND DRIVE SYSTEM
Another instance of the complexity of these inter-glandular reactions
is furnished by the thyroid and the adrenals. The thyroid and the
adrenals are mutually stimulating--when the thyroid oversecretes, the
adrenal dittos, and vice versa. Yet they have directly opposed effects
upon the economy--because they act upon antagonistic portions of
the involuntary or vegetative nervous system, the system which is
independent of the will. Before proceeding further, it is worth while
sketching this division of the nervous system.
In the construction of a motor car from the point of view of absolute
control of it at every moment, the first thought of the mechanic is an
adequate _brake_ and an efficient _regulator_ of speed, instruments
antagonistic, but necessary to work simultaneously or alternately.
The involuntary or vegetative nervous system is built upon the same
principle. It supplies every organ in the body beyond the control of
the will (that is to say, the brain) with two sets of filaments which
have opposing functions. One group of filaments in general increases
or activates the function of the organ to which it is distributed. The
other group of filaments, when tingling, inhibits or prohibits that
function. They are like the two buttons on the wall which regulate
the supply of electricity to incandescent bulbs, one switching on the
current, the other switching it off. It has been agreed to call the
stimulative or activating portion the autonomic or drive system. To
its antagonist has been left the older name of the sympathetic or
check system. It is because they do not both act upon these two
components of the vegetative nervous system, but only upon one, that
the thyroid and adrenal though in themselves complementary, come to
exert opposite effects. For the internal secretion of the thyroid has
a selective affinity for the autonomic or activating system, while
that of the adrenals has a selective affinity for the sympathetic or
inhibiting system.
In the stomach, for instance, extracts of the adrenal glands have been
proved to intensify the function of the sympathetic or check system
in different degrees, so that there is a lessening of the amount and
acidity of the gastric fluid. On the other hand, thyroid extracts will
intensify the action of the autonomic or drive system, so that the
amount and acidity of the digestive juice is increased.
The stomach cell may, therefore, be regarded as a test-reagent for
the different internal secretions, as they affect the check and drive
systems.
These constitute an automatic device for regulating the activities of
every organ. Three factors enter into the mechanism. One is the amount
of the circulating internal secretions. Another is the organic and
functional integrity of the nerve filaments comprising the check and
drive systems. The third consists of the number and vitality and
limitations of the terminal receiving cells acted upon by the nerve
filaments, which in their turn have been acted upon by the internal
secretions. Upon every organ, including the mind, through the brain, a
stimulus from without or within will act according to its ability to
influence one or others of these factors.
Normally, the check and drive systems are properly balanced. But under
stress and strain the balance is upset. Indeed, the Kinetic Drive may
be defined as a mechanism contrived in the course of evolution as the
normal, healthy mode for meeting stress and strain. The Kinetic chain
of organs, brain, adrenals, liver, thyroid and muscles, began working
together in desperate situations for their possessor ages ago.
Successful in helping him to survive, they have survived as a
functional unit.
It was probably evolved in the Post-Tertiary Era, about twenty million
years ago, when the coming of the carnivores introduced direct
body-to-body conflicts, and their concomitants, a quick and versatile
nervous system. During the Tertiary epoch the earth basked in the heat
of a tropical sun nearly everywhere on its surface. The luxuriant
vegetation of the torrid zone flourished and swarmed, for the
temperature all over was what it is today at the equator. Gigantic
vegetarians were the animals, creatures like the dinosaurs, enormous,
gargoylean monsters, of an incredible size and strength, but clumsy
and grotesque, with small brains and little intelligence. For what
need was there for brain and intelligence when food lay about so
abundantly at hand for them to gorge themselves. As there was no
competition for food, there were no enemies.
Then as the earth evolved and grew cooler, vegetation failed, the
ancestors of the present carnivora appeared, the fathers of the
wolf and tiger, light, lithe and pugnacious, with senses acute and
ferocious weapons of attack, who set out to destroy everybody. They
destroyed pretty nearly all of the huge leaf-eating species, and only
the more plastic and smaller ones, who were more keen-sensed and
swift-footed (of whom the deer and antelope, horse and ox are the
descendants), escaped. The smallest either took to the air to become
the bat, or, like the forerunners of the squirrel and ape, took to the
trees.
It was the coming of the carnivores, therefore, that accelerated the
development of brain matter, and started the process which created
man. But in the millions and millions of years of conflicts, instincts
grew into being that sank deep into bone and marrow. The most
fundamental reflexes, those immediate responses to irritation or
danger, were laid down, and among them the drive and check system.
When the animal had decided to fight its enemy or was forced to fight,
or determined to prey, then was the time for the drive system to do
its utmost to speed up everything that would help in the fight, while
the check system came into play to hinder whatever would interfere or
burden in the fray. First the drive mechanism must have been hit upon,
and then the value of the check devices must have been found in fear
and flight, and especially in hiding and simulation of death, when
even breathing had to be inhibited. Until finally there developed, for
everyday use, a complete check and drive nerve machinery for every
organ, to be used according to the exigencies of the moment, with the
thyroid as the primary stimulant and controller of the drive system
and the adrenal as the primary dictator over the check system.
THE HARMONY OF THE HORMONES
All the glands, in fact, work in unison, with a distribution of the
balance of power that diplomatists might envy. In the co-ordinating
synchronism, the vegetative nervous system plays the part of an agent
that acts as well as is acted upon. The chemical interaction of the
internal secretions is not the only way in which they influence each
other. For, as the case of the thyroid and the adrenal so well shows,
secretions which, when directly interacting, are mutually reinforcing,
when affecting nerves, may become clashing opponents.
The Kinetic Chain is about as good a case as there is of the glands of
internal secretion co-operating. The Check and Drive systems, with the
adrenals and thyroid opposed, are one of the best instances of their
antagonisms. Besides, there are a number of other relationships
between them that might be cited. They all bear with more or less
pressure, positive or negative, upon the sex glands which will be
considered in its place. If one wished to consider all the glands in
their pro and anti relations, a separate volume would be required.
THE VEGETATIVE APPARATUS
The combination of the internal secretions and the vegetative system
has been spoken of as the vegetative or autonomic apparatus. The
vegetative apparatus is the oldest part of the nervous system.
And some acquaintance with its constitution is necessary to any
understanding of the possibilities of control of human nature.
For modern thought does not regard the brain as the organ of mind at
all, but as one unit of a complex synthesis, of which mind is the
product, and the vegetative apparatus is the major component. That
involves the blasting of the last current superstition of the
traditional psychology, the dogma that the brain is the exclusive seat
of mind.
That an animal is a vast concourse of cells is one of the accepted
fundamentals of biology. What is not so generally taken into
consideration is that the assemblage is formed by the agglutinations
of millions of years, and that it is hence composed of parts of
different ages and pedigrees, some exceedingly ancient and hoary, some
middle-aged, and some relatively new and recent. In the invertebrates,
who date further back in the history of the planet than any
vertebrate, the nervous system consists of discrete patches of nerve
cells, the ganglions composing the ganglionic system of which the
vegetative or autonomic nervous system of man is the direct descendant
and representative. The brain and central nervous system are
definitely later acquisitions, imposed upon the original stratum of
the check and drive machine.
The primitive chassis of the mechanism, so to speak, is the so-called
vegetative nervous system. Grouped with that system are the primeval
breathing, feeding and reproducing inventions, the viscera boxed up
in the chest and abdomen. The third partner is the glands of internal
secretion, which act upon the viscera both directly and indirectly
through the check and drive effect upon the vegetative nerves.
The glands are like tuning keys, by which certain strings in the
instrument may be tightened, so that its vibratory activity is
increased, or they may be loosened, the vibrations decreased, the
activity lessened. Tuning up the motors is a constant process in the
organism. Finally, there are the large nerve masses at the base of the
brain known as the basal ganglia, which contain the nerve centers for
the co-ordination of the other three. All these together constitute
the oldest family of the corporate organism. Beside them, the brain
and the face and the prehensile organs are mere parvenus.
THE OLDEST PART OF THE MIND
Granted, then, that this vegetative apparatus is the most deeply
rooted core of our being. What warrant is there for the grandiloquence
of the phrase: the Oldest part of the Mind? There is, indeed, room for
rhetoric, even poetry, here. For all the evidence points to it as the
rightful occupant of the throne upon which Shelley placed his Brownie
as the Soul of the Soul. Or to put it in another way, we think and
feel primarily with the vegetative apparatus, with our muscles,
especially the involuntary, with our viscera, and particularly with
our internal secretions. Whenever there is thought and feeling, there
is movement, commotion, precedent and concomitant, among these. They
are the oldest seats of feeling, thought and will and continue to
function as such.
Just what evidence is there for this conception? In the first place,
there is the fascinating story of the origin of vertebrates from
invertebrates of the sea scorpion or spider type. Then there is a
whole group of data which demonstrate that the primitive wishes which
make up the content of a baby consciousness are determined, settled by
states of relaxation or tension in different segments or areas of the
vegetative apparatus. According to this, the brain enters as only one
of the characters in the play of consciousness. It is just the organ
of awareness by the organism of itself as an integer which must adjust
itself to the specific condition within the disturbed vegetative
apparatus. Consequently the brain emerges not as the master tissue,
but as merely the servant of the vegetative apparatus.
Consciousness is a circuit. Swinging around in it are the
wish-feelings generated by the vegetative dynamo. From each viscus,
from the stomach and intestine, from the kidneys and bladder, from
the liver and spleen, from the blood-vessels, from all the glands
of external and internal secretion, there flow along the vegetative
nerves, to and from the brain, energies of various qualities and
intensities. All the members of the vegetative apparatus are more or
less active, and so all our wishes are all more or less active. All
our working hours we are aware of hunger, satiety or indifference, of
a desire to empty the intestine or bladder, or of a lack of necessity
of doing so, of a state of tranquillity of the blood-vessels and sweat
glands, or of a perturbation of them, of a varying tensity of even the
muscles that are, as we say, under the control of the will, of the
state, in fact, of all the elements of the vegetative complex. The
stream of feeling which constitutes the undertow of consciousness
originates outside of the brain altogether, and is composed of
currents arising from viscera, muscles, blood-vessels and glands.
Now the component currents are of different sizes and positions and
variable degrees of warmth. That is another way of saying that whether
or not a current is to become the center of the stream, or to approach
it, or whether it is to be hot, cold, or tepid, depends upon the
degree of activity of the various parts of the vegetative apparatus.
A convenient name for this is _tonus_. Tonus can be experimentally
watched and measured. Thus hunger, the most primitive of the
wish-feelings, has been found to be simultaneous with certain
characteristic contractions of the stomach. Stop those contractions,
and you stop the hunger. The contractions begin slowly and weakly,
and no awareness of them occurs in the mind. As they grow stronger,
consciousness becomes a sensation rather like an itch somewhere in
the upper abdomen, and accompanied sometimes by a sense of general
weakness. The vegetative activity going on as a current almost on the
outside of the stream of feeling has swelled and warmed, and so forced
itself, in a manner of speaking, into the center of the stream. Or if
you will, the rest of the stream has to arrange itself around it as
the center. A similar mechanism for the tonus of the other members
of the vegetative system, and how they determine consciousness and
behaviour is understandable. It has been shown that when the bladder
tone and the intestinal tone are of a definitely measurable size, one
has the desire to empty them. The same applies to the sex glands.
The pressure within a viscus is dependent upon the ratio between the
amount of contraction of the involuntary muscle in its walls, the
external pressure, and the quantity of its distending contents, the
internal pressure. The resultant quotient, the internal pressure
divided by the external pressure, measures the intravisceral pressure.
The primitive wish-feelings are the direct expressions of the various
intravisceral pressures, or tones. The primitive soul is an awareness
of the fused primitive wish-feelings of themselves as a whole, and of
the struggle between them for recognition, isolation, and, as we say,
satisfaction. This satisfaction consists in a degradation of the
highest intravisceral pressure to a point at which some other
intravisceral pressure becomes higher and therefore predominant.
PHYSICS OF THE WISH
Mind, consciousness, may then be portrayed as an ocean comprised of
mobile current layers, complexes built up around the awareness of
different intravisceral pressures. A shifting hierarchy of such
pressures form the points of focusing of consciousness that result in
conduct. Behaviour may be defined as the resultant of the organism's
pressure against the environment's counter pressure until there is
a sufficient reduction of the specifically exciting intravisceral
pressure. Just as water flows to its own level, so will conduct flow
to reduce intravisceral pressure to its own level. A physics of the
soul comes into prospect, in which a mathematical analysis will state
the process quantitatively in terms of some common unit of pressure.
Not only conduct, but also character, because it is past conduct
repeated, associated, and fixed, will be so statable. For
intravisceral tonus or pressure is not simply or only an acute or
passing affair. There is for it a persistent or average figure,
the so-called normal for it, below which or above which the acute
situation will bring it. _Character_ is a _matter then of standards
in the vegetative system_. Character, indeed, is an alloy of the
different standard intravisceral pressures of the organism, a fusion
created by the resistance or counter pressure of the obstacles in the
environment. Character, in short, is the grand intravisceral barometer
of a personality.
Thus the comfortable, healthy, happy, well-balanced, progressive,
constructive, virile personality is one in whom there is a
continuously harmonious reduction of the intravisceral pressures in
the environment called society. For in a gregarious creature, like
man, fellow beings are the most powerful determinants of negative and
positive vegetative pressures. Not so well rounded are other types
existing because of inferiorities or excesses of the standard visceral
tone. There is, for instance, the sexually cold type, comfortable by
creating for itself an anaphrodisiac environment composed of pressures
that can be fitted into its own. Or there may be an insufficiency of
standard pressure in the alimentary tract, and we have the ascetic,
mal-nourished, striving, uplifting type. Different types will be made
by the permutations and combinations of factors that determine the
intravisceral pressure and the environmental, i.e., social resistances
or counter pressures.
INTERNAL SECRETIONS DETERMINANTS OF VEGETATIVE PRESSURES
Now of all the different factors which determine the tones, that is to
say, the internal pressures, of the various parts of the vegetative
apparatus (including all structures not controlled by the will in
the term), the internal secretions or hormones are by far the most
important. This significance is conferred upon them because it is
by their activities primarily that these pressures are produced,
regulated, lowered and heightened; in short, controlled. We have seen
how the thyroid and adrenal hold the reins of the drive or check
systems in the vegetative apparatus. Together with the other ductless
glands, they decide the advance or halt, forward or retreat, tension
or relaxation, charge and discharge, of the visceral--involuntary
muscle--blood vessel combination which is at the core of life. Here
again they emerge as the directorate.
Carlson, the Chicago physiologist, who probably knows more about being
hungry than any other man on the planet, once demonstrated that the
injection of an ounce or two of the blood, which means the internal
secretion mixture, of a starving animal, into one not starving
increased the signs of hunger and the accompanying hunger contractions
of the stomach. There can be no doubt that hunger is the expression of
a certain specific concentration of internal secretion or secretions
in the blood. When the quantity, in the cycles of metabolism, becomes
sufficiently great, it stimulates the stomach to contract in a way
which augments the pressure within it to a point at which the feeling
of hungriness, and the wish to satisfy it, or to get rid of it,
becomes imperative, and the dominant of consciousness.
Without doubt the sexual cravings are likewise so determined. Sex
libido is an expression of a certain concentration, a definite amount
peculiar to the individual, of the substance manufactured by the
interstitial cells, circulating in the blood. It arouses its effects
probably by (1) increasing the amount of reproductive material in
the sex glands in a direct chemically stimulating effect upon the
germinative cells, and so raising the internal pressure within them,
(2) stimulating the involuntary muscles within the walls and the
canals of the sex glands, and so, by augmenting the tenseness of the
muscles, elevating the total intravisceral pressure, (3) by a direct
chemical and indirect nervous effect upon the brain, the muscles, the
heart, as well as the other glands of internal secretion stimulating
the organism as a whole. Though the isolation in pure form of the
substance or substances involved has never been scientifically
achieved, their inference is entirely justified. It is indeed the only
comprehensible mechanism conceivable that will fit all the known facts
about the matter. And even though the assertions of Brown-Sequard were
only the exaggerations of a semi-charlatan, it is certain that some
day in the near future the particular substance, that he claimed he
had discovered, will be handed about in bottles for the inspection of
the curious.
Besides thyroxin, adrenalin, and the libido-producing secretion of the
interstitial cells, the substance produced by the paired glandlets,
situated behind the thyroid, the parathyroids, have a profound
influence upon the vegetative apparatus and the vegetative nervous
system. These direct the lime exchanges within the cells of the
organisms, including the nerve cells. It has been shown that lime is,
relatively, a sedative to cells. It raises the threshold or strength
of stimulus necessary to evoke a reaction. Removing the parathyroids
means removing the lime barrier, for with their deficiency there is a
change in, and then an escape, from the blood, of the lime, by way
of the kidneys. The result is sometimes an enormous increase in the
excitability of all the cells, and especially of the vegetative
apparatus. What that means for the individual whose comfort depends
upon a stability of the intravisceral tones and pressures may be
readily imagined.
The pancreas likewise acts as a sedative to the vegetative apparatus.
In particular, this applies to the sugar mechanism in the liver under
the discipline of the check and drive organization. The adrenal and
the pancreas are the direct antagonists in the struggle for control of
sugar. Removal of the adrenals will cause a decrease in the amount
of sugar in the blood, while removal of the pancreas will produce an
increase. Excess of sugar in the blood may thus be concomitant with
changes of character considered incorrigible.
In different locales of the vegetative apparatus, as indeed of
the body in general, the directorate seems to be handed over to a
committee of control, generally made up of two members working
in opposing directions. Such a division of power in the general
directorate is analogous to the small holding corporations which
divide functions in, for example, the United States Steel Corporation.
The relative ratios of tonus in these smaller internal secretion
balances are of the utmost significance as causes of differences
in the vegetative apparatus, which are the basis of differences in
structure, power, and character between individuals.
THE GENERAL LAWS OF THE DIRECTORATE
Our knowledge of the glands of internal secretions as an interlocking
directorate presiding over all the functions of the organism is still
exceedingly meagre. As yet, we seem to be knocking at the portals
of the chemistry of the imponderable. There are holes in the bronze
doors, and we glimpse the unfathomable distances of unexplored
regions. But we do see something, and we do glimpse a beginning.
Already the outlines of a differential anatomy, and a different
physiology and a differential psychology, which will explain to us
the unique in the constitution, the temperament and character of
an individual, emerge. It is worth while, before proceeding to the
details, so valuable to a society which would become rational, to
summarize the general principles emerging, expressing the directing
powers of the ductless glands over the individual. _They may be
regarded as the present postulates of a new science of the whys and
wherefores separating and setting apart, as so recognizably distinct,
those peregrinating chemical mixtures: men and women_.
1. The life of every individual, in every stage, is dominated largely
by his glands of internal secretion. That is, they, as a complex
internal messenger and director system, control organ and function,
conduct and character. The orderliness of human life, in the
sequential march of its episodes, crises, successes and failures,
depends, to a large extent, upon their interactions with each other
and with the environment.
2. One or several of the glands possesses a controlling or superior
influence above that of the others in the physiology of the individual
and so becomes the central gland of his life, its dominant, indeed, so
far as it casts a deciding vote or veto, in its everyday existence and
incidents as well as in its high points, the climaxes and emergencies.
3. These glandular preponderances are at the basis of personality,
creating genius and dullard, weakling and giant, Cavalier and Puritan.
All human traits may be analyzed in terms of them because they are
expressions of them.
4. Specific types of personality may be directly associated with
particular glandular prominences, so that we have the thyroid-centered
types, the pituitary-centered types, the adrenal-centered types, etc.
These are the classic Three, the prototypes in their purity most
easily described and recognized.
5. Combinations of these, as well as of other glands--with joint
predominance--occur and indeed form the majority of populations. The
phenomena of varieties in species are thus explained.
6. Internal secretion traits are inherited, and variations in heredity
are essentially the structural representation of the resultant of a
parallelogram of forces exerted by each of the parental prepotent
glands. If they are of the same type, they may reinforce each other:
if not, inhibitions and compensations will come into play. Mendelian
laws may apply.
7. The process of evolution, as the play of natural selection upon
these variations, becomes comprehensible from a new standpoint.
8. Certain diseases, and disease tendencies, both acute and
constitutional, as well as traits of temperament and character, and
predetermined reactions to certain recurring situations in life,
are rooted in the glandular soils that compose the stuff of the
individual.
9. The subconscious, of which the vegetative apparatus is the physical
basis, leads back to the internal secretions for the profoundest
springs of its secrets. We shall see how and why.
10. Given the internal secretory composition, so to speak, of an
individual--his endocrine formula--and so his intravisceral pressures,
one may predict, within limits, his physical and psychic make-up,
the general lines of his life, diseases, tastes, idiosyncrasies and
habits.
11. Within limits, if the previous history of an individual is known,
his physical appearance may be approximately described, and his future
outlined.
12. Conversely, given the physical and psychic composition of an
individual, and his past history, one may deduce the internal
secretion type to which he belongs.
Examples:
A. One Thyroid-centered Type has
Bright eyes
Good clean teeth
Symmetrical features
Moist flushed skin
Temperamental attitude toward life
Tendency to heart, intestinal and nervous disease
B. One Pituitary-centered Type
Abnormally large or small size
Musical--acute sense of rhythm
Asymmetrical features
Tendency to cyclic or periodic diseases
C. One Adrenal-centered Type
Hairy
Dark
Masculinity marked
Tendency to diphtheria and hernia
These are some of the master types. They have their variants depending
upon the influences of the other glands, especially the interstitial
cells of the sex glands.
ANTE-NATAL DEVELOPMENT
In their ensemble, the glands of internal secretion wield a
determining influence upon the development of the individual from
his very inception. If his various powers may be conceived of as an
orchestra, they may be said to conduct it from the very beginning of
its movements, and to cease only with its termination. From the moment
when the spermatozoon penetrates and fecundates the ovum, the fate
of the future being is settled by their disposition. The seal of his
destiny is soaked with their substance.
POST-NATAL DEVELOPMENT
Every particle of protoplasm, every granule of the impregnated ovum
carries the representatives of the parental ductless glands. As a
consequence, they transmit chemically, with no figure of speech
involved, the peculiar familial, racial and national characters from
progenitors to offspring. They confer upon the child a number of the
properties commonly recognized as inherited. All those features which
distinguish Caucasian from Mongolian, Scandinavian from Italian,
Italian from Jew are determined by them.
In short, at every step of his life, in every relation and
association, in every expression of the inner forces that control his
being, the normal individual is influenced by his internal secretions.
Let us now see how.
CHAPTER V
HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE NORMAL BODY
The origin of the remarkable differences between individuals that
distinguish species, varieties and families, has long been one of the
chief puzzles of biology. It may indeed be called the leading puzzle,
which led Darwin on to the collection of the data that culminated in
the "Origin of Species." The why of the Unique is the fundamental
problem of those who would understand life.
An explanation is an attempt at a consistent and persistent, sometimes
an obstinate clarity of mind. A vast number of observations gathered
by laboratory experimentalists as well as by those naturalists of the
abnormal, physicians in active practice, prove that the construction
of the individual both during development before maturity, and
maintenance during maturity, his constitution, in short, is directed
by the endocrine glands. It is possible now to present an explanation
of the individuality of the individual.
To assert that variation is responsible for the individual, that it
is the mechanism which isolates him as a being like none other of his
fellows, not even his parents, brothers, and sisters, is merely to beg
the question. What is variation? The internal secretion theory of the
process offers, for the first time, an explanation that is coherent
and comprehensive, based upon concrete and detailed observations.
It provides an adequate interpretation of the numberless hereditary
gradations and transitions, blendings and mixtures. It suggests a
control of heredity in the future.
THE PURE TYPES
In the pure types, only one gland, either by being present in great
excess above the average, or by being pretty well below the average,
comes to exercise the dominating influence upon the traits of the
organism. As the strongest link in the chain, or as the weakest, it
rules. The others must accommodate themselves to it. Among them as
commanders of growth, development and normal function, it holds the
balance of power. In every emergency it stands out by its strength or
by its weakness. It thus creates its own type of man or woman, with
attributes and characteristics peculiar to itself. These pure types,
as we have seen, are mainly the thyroid, the pituitary, and the
adrenal-centered.
Each with the signs peculiar to it can be identified among the faces
that pass one in the street. And they differ so markedly among
themselves that they provide a new and accurate means of classifying
varieties among the races of the species: man. The thyroid type
differs as much from the adrenal type as does a greyhound from a
bull-dog. The greyhound has a certain size, form, character and
capacity. The bull-dog has similar qualities which are yet quite
different. Each is built for a particular career. Among human beings,
the pure thyroid type is easily distinguished from the pure adrenal
type, and both of these from the pure pituitary type. Each is stamped
with a significant figure, height, skin, hair, temperament, ambition,
social reactions and predisposition to certain diseases.
THE MIXED TYPES
Among the mixed types, the lines of distinction are less clear, and so
they are more difficult to classify. The mixed types may be said to
be hyphenated. In them, two or even three of the internal secretory
glands conflict for predominance. The combined action makes for a
resultant modification in the primary glandular markings and effects.
A hyphenated classification thus becomes inevitable. Especially is
this so if the two glands are mutually antagonistic and inhibitory.
A compromise effect is then necessitated. Or an individual may be
dominated by one gland at one period of his life and by another at a
later period. One of the glands, the thyroid, for example, will show,
by the traces it has left upon the earliest developing features, that
it was in control at the very earliest dates of his history, while
other signs will disclose the more recent influence of the adrenal
or of the pituitary. The combination becomes classifiable as the
thyroid-pituitary type, or as the thyroid-adrenal type.
That the external features as well as the chronic diseases of human
beings are controlled by some common factor has long been suspected.
Inquiries into morbid phenomena with a hereditary trend yielded
information that has paved the way for the internal secretion theory.
It has long been known that certain diseases effect only certain
individuals of a definite constitution. Apoplexy, diabetes,
arteriosclerosis, Bright's disease, are met with almost exclusively in
what the older clinicians talked about as the apopleptic type. On the
other hand, they said, anemias, tuberculosis, hemophilias, scrofulas
occurred more among the lymphatic type. But they had no idea whatever
of the true functional basis of the two different types. The truth
as we of today view it is that these two types represent different
textures of human beings, fabricated of different internal secretions.
They are really two different breeds of the species Homo Sapiens. The
materials being different, the color and feel of them is different,
and the resistance to wear and tear is different.
ENDOCRINE ANALYSIS
The modes of classification glimpsed at are certainly exceedingly
broad and sweeping. It is well enough to establish types and classes.
But beneath them are sheltered the infinite possibilities of
permutations and combinations, which explain the countless variety
and complexity of form and function. Every individual born among the
vertebrates, for example, must have a certain definite amount and
percentage of pituitary gland, anterior and posterior, pineal,
thyroid, parathyroid, thymus, adrenal, pancreas, interstitial and
so on. Now if, to state it in terms of percentages, for the sake of
argument, the pituitary is 25, the pineal 10, the thyroid 36, the
parathyroids 15, the thymus 29, the adrenals 60, the pancreas 49, the
interstitials 72 (the gland when acting maximally to be graded as
100), we see at once how different such an individual must be from one
who has, say, pituitary 84, pineal 39, thyroid 26, parathyroid 42,
adrenals 96, pancreas 22 and interstitials 89. One obtains at once
from the contrasts of such figures some idea of the possibilities. As
each point plus or minus must count to produce some difference in the
individual, the results are manifest. Varying within the numerical
limits imposed by genus, species, variety and family (which limits
are probably responsible for the persistence of the particular genus,
species, variety, or family) the individual becomes an individual
because of the relative values of the percentages in his blood and
tissues of these different internal secretions. We thus begin to gain
an insight into the patterns according to which men, women and animals
are woven.
We are, as yet, far from an exact endocrine analysis of the
individual. But we know that the endocrines rule over growth and
nutrition, a vast dominion which incorporates every organ and every
tissue. By enhancing or retarding the nutritional changes, the growth
of the organ or tissue is favored or restricted. The size and shape of
an individual, as a whole, as well as of the specialized cell masses
composing him, as hands and feet, the nose and ears, and so on, are
therefore controlled by them. Whether an organism is to be tall or
short, lean or corpulent, graceful or awkward, is decided by their
interactions. These, like human covenants, vary with the different
reactions of the parties to the contract. And so a great deal depends
upon whether they work harmoniously or discordantly, and upon which
does the most work and which the least.
Undersecretion and Oversecretion
It is when a gland, either in the course of development, or because of
the influence of starvation, shock, injury, poisoning or infection,
begins to undersecrete or oversecrete that its effects upon growth and
nutrition become grossly manifest. A veritable transfiguration of the
individual may occur, the black magic of which may perplex him for
a lifetime. A man, made eunuchoid by an accident or by mumps, will
observe in himself astonishing changes in his constitutional make-up,
mentality and sexuality. He would be more astounded to learn that
beneath the appearances, the changes, so alarming him, there are
profound alterations in the rate at which he is taking in oxygen,
burning up sugar, accumulating carbon dioxide and excreting waste
byproducts through the kidneys, which are responsible for them.
The differences between the normal and abnormal are only a matter of
degree. And so, to be sure, are differences between types. But it is
hard to realize that the striking distinctions between the thyroid
type and the pituitary, comparable, as said, to the differences
between a greyhound and a bull-dog, are dependent solely upon
quantitative variations in the general and local speeds of metabolism,
among the cells.
DIVISION OF LABOR
Besides the antagonisms and co-operations between them, there are
certain lines along which the glands, in their effects, specialize.
The thyroid, for instance, is concerned specially with the regulation
of the shape, form and finish of an organ. The pituitary shines at the
periods of developmental crises, determining them and modifying them.
It exerts the greatest influence upon the time of eruption of the
teeth, both the temporary and the permanent, the onset of puberty, the
recurrence of menstruation in women, and the time of occurrence of
labor. The interstitial glands distribute the basis of the powers and
limitations of masculinity and femininity. Abnormalities of these
glands also affect the individual all along the line, in all of his
aspects. So affected he may apparently change into a wholly different
being. He may change in size, in the shape of his head, feet and
hands, as well as in his habits, aptitudes and dispositions. So he may
find it necessary to purchase an entirely different size of hat, more
commodious clothes, and newly fitting gloves and shoes. At the same
time, his family, relatives and friends, discover that the erstwhile
generous, frank, neat and punctual and liked, has become stingy and
suspicious and slovenly and hated. And all because a gland has begun
to undersecrete or to oversecrete. The transformation will be slight
or marked, depending entirely upon the extent of impairment, positive
or negative, of the gland involved.
But it is not only in the shaping of the normal individual's
architecture that the internal secretions dominate. Over that subtle
something known in all languages as vitality, expressive of the
intensity of feeling, thought and reactions in cells, they rule
supreme. Gay vivacity and grim determination, the temperament of a
Louis XIV, and the soul of a Cromwell, are the crystallizations of
these chemical substances acting upon the brain.
INTERNAL SECRETION VARIETIES
There is no better way of illustrating the influence of the internal
secretions upon the normal than the analysis of the variation of
traits with variations in glandular predominances. The general build
of an individual, his skeletal type, the proportion between the size
of his arms and that of his legs, as well as that between his trunk
and his lower extremities, whether he is to be tall, lanky and
loutish, or short, squat and dumpy, are to be considered. Different
facial types are the expressions of underlying endocrine differences.
The head and skull offer a number of clues to the controlling
secretions in the blood and tissues. Whether the forehead is to be
broad or narrow, the distance between the eyes, the character of the
eyebrows, the shape and size and appearance of the eyes themselves,
the mould of the nose and jaws and the peculiarities of the teeth, are
all so determined. The skin, in its color, texture, the quantity
and distribution of its fatty and other constituents, eruptions and
weather reactions, is influenced. Also the mucous membranes, the
color and lustre and structure of the hair, as well as its general
distribution and development, are hieroglyphics of the endocrine
processes below the surface. Whether the muscles are massive or
sparse, atrophied or hypertrophied, soft or hard, easily fatigable
or not, bespeak conditions in the glandular chain. In short, we must
regard the individual as an immensely complicated pattern of designs
traced by the hormones as the primary etchers of his development.
Though it must be admitted that the number of unknown and unsolved
relations in the pattern are still enormously great, enough has
been established to make possible a rough working analysis of the
particular, unique organism placed before us for examination as Mr.
Smith, Mrs. Jones, or Miss Smith-Jones.
WHAT IS THE NORMAL?
Anthropologists, from the beginning of anthropology, have battled
in vain for a satisfactory inclusive definition, or, at least,
description of the normal. With the introduction of the biometric
method, the goal at last appeared within sight. A cocked hat curve
expressing the distribution and range of the normal looks formidable.
The attainable turned out a mirage, for the curves constructable by
the measurement of traits of a population only proved the truth of the
old axiom that all transitions and variations between extremes exist.
The Problem of the Normal seemed more elusive than ever. And the best
that could be done for the elucidation of its mystery, was to apply
and observe the law of averages.
From the endocrine standpoint, the reason for this becomes clear. The
biometric method concerned itself with externals, with, as it were,
symptoms. Since these external signs are but manifestations of the
inner chemical reactions, of which the internal secretions are the
determining reagents, or factors, with permutations and combinations
possible in all directions, the diversity and variability of each
individual and his traits stands explained and understandable. The
normal, as the perfect or nearly perfect balance of forces in the
organism, at any given moment, emerges as a more definite and real
concept than that which would abstract it from a curve of variations.
Moreover, since the directive forces within the organism are
pre-eminently the internal secretions, the normal becomes definable as
their harmonious balancing or equilibrium, a state which tends not to
undo (as the abnormal does) but to prolong itself.
The potential combinations and compensations, antagonisms and
counteractions, attainable within the endocrine glands as an
interlocking directorate, point the cause for the elusive quality of
the normal. Tall men and short men, blonde women and dumpy women,
lanky hatchet-faced people, stout moon-faced people, Falstaff and
Queen Elizabeth, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Disraeli and
Walt Whitman, Caesar and Alexander, as well as Mr. Smith and Miss
Jones come within the range of the normal. There are all kinds and
conditions and sorts of men and women, and all kinds and sorts and
conditions of the normal, because an incalculable number of harmonious
relations and interactions between the endocrines are possible, and
do actually occur. The standard of the normal must obviously not be
a single standard, but a series of standards, depending upon which
glands predominate, and how the others adapt themselves to its
predominance. Adrenal-centered types, thyroid-centered types,
pituitary-centered types, thymus-centered types, as well as hyphenated
compounds of these, such as the pituitary-adrenal types, exist as
normals. They can be conceived of as normal types because they exist
as normal types.
THE SKELETAL TYPES
Now men, for as long as we have any knowledge of their thoughts and
classifications and attitudes, have been accustomed to first think
of one another, to classify and size one another as tall or short,
slender or broad, thin or corpulent. The biological necessity, indeed,
instinct of the one animal to relate the other animal to aggressive or
harmless agencies in his surroundings, accounts for this. Relatively,
of course, for all these modes of description imply offensive or
defensive possibilities of the stimulus for the recorder in relation
to himself. The interest in stature is fundamental, and has persisted
in the most civilized, nations. The relationship of height and weight,
as well as of length and breadth, to other physical traits, have
formed the subject of scientific study. There is, for instance, the
classification of Bean, who divided mankind generally into two types,
those of a medium size, stocky long legs and arms, large hands and
feet, short trunk, and face large in comparison to the head (the
meso-onto-morphs) and those who were either tall and slender, or small
and delicate, with the smaller face, eyes close together, long, high,
narrow nose, and trunk longer as compared with the extremities (the
hyper-onto-morphs). Bean showed, too, that the hypers (to use a short
word to contrast with the mesos) were present to the extent of almost
a hundred per cent in a series of tuberculosis, and about ninety per
cent in a series of central nervous system disease. All of which is
exceedingly interesting and suggestive, but throws no light upon the
underlying mechanisms of statures.
STATURE AND GROWTH
Stature is essentially determined by the growth of the long bones.
They are the pace-makers, and the muscles and soft tissues follow the
pace they set. Now the primary determinant, catalyst or sensitizer of
the growth of the long bones is the anterior pituitary. All statures
should therefore be first scrutinized from the point of view of the
pituitary. Individuals over six feet tall or under five feet five
inches should be looked upon as having a pituitary trend. This
pituitary trend may be primary, due to its own undergrowth or
overgrowth, or it may be due to lack of inhibition from the sex glands
such as occurs in eunuchs and eunuchoids, or excessive or premature
inhibition from them as happens in certain salacious dwarfs.
The long bones grow at a point of junction between the bone proper
and an overlying layer of gristle or cartilage, known as the zone of
ossification. It is upon this zone of ossification that the various
growth influences appear to focus and concentrate their efforts, among
them the internal secretions. After growth has been finished, that is,
after adolescence, these zones of ossification close, so that growth
is no longer possible unless they become reactivated. Upon the zone of
ossification must act the pituitary, and indirectly the thyroid, the
interstitial cells, the thymus and the adrenals. Individuals oversized
or undersized either belong to the pituitary type, or if hyphenated,
have the pituitary as one of the dominants in their composition. The
necessities of child-bearing determine a greater angle between trunk
and lower extremities in the female. Underactivity of the pituitary,
for instance, will prevent the development of the normal angle. The
ratio in length of the upper limbs to the lower is a fairly constant
relationship for each sex normally Deviations occur with a break
somewhere in the chain of cooperation of the internal secretions
controlling the growth of bone.
HANDS, FINGERS AND TOES
The size and shape and general configuration of the hands, fingers
and toes are details that tell an endocrine tale. Students of hands
naturally have grouped them as the long slender and the short, broad,
the bony and the well-filled out, the tapering fingers and the stumpy.
The character of a hand is determined anatomically by the length and
breadth of the bones, the amount and distribution of fat, and the
thickness and elasticity of the skin. Over these, the essential
control lies in the pituitary and the thyroid. So we find that
pituitary types have, when there is oversecretion, large bony, gross
hands, spade-shaped, or when there is undersecretion, hands that are
plump, with peculiarly tapering fleshy fingers. The hyperthyroid has
long slender fingers, the subthyroid pudgy, coarse, ugly foreshortened
hands, often cold, and bluish.
FACIAL TYPES
An artist will see in a face the past history of generations, a
narrative of the adventures of the blood, a record of tears and
smiles, wrinkles and dimples, the victories and defeats of buried
drudgery and romance. These signatures which the Faculty of Life have
scribbled or engraved over it as upon a diploma, bespeak for him
spiritual moments. To the student of the internal secretions the
lines, expressions, attitudes are important for they tell of the state
of tensions and strains in the vegetative apparatus with which they
are inseparably connected. It is when one comes to the consideration
of the face as a complex of brows, eyes, nose, lips and jaws that he
becomes most interested. For in the modeling and tone of every one of
the features each of the endocrine glands has something to say. In
consequence there has been described the hyperpituitary face, and the
hyperthyroid face, the subthyroid face and the subpituitary face, the
adrenal face, the eunuchoid face and the ovarian face and also the
thymic.
To bring to mind an immediate complete image of the hyperthyroid face,
one should think of Shelley. The oval shape of it, with the delicate
modeling of all the features, the wide, high brow, the large,
vivacious, prominent eyes with the glint of a divine fire in them and
the sensitive lips all belong to the classical picture. Generally
flushed over the cheek-bones, there is undoubtedly a certain
effeminate effect associated with it. At least, it is the least animal
and brutish of the faces of man.
On the other hand, the subthyroid face is that of the cretin and
cretinoid idiot, in a mild degree. So characteristic that we recognize
the portrait in the descriptions of Pliny in early Roman tunes and of
Marco Polo in his Asiatic travels. Coarseness, dullness, pudginess are
its keynotes. Irregular features, tendency to wide separation of the
eyes and pug nose, sallow, puffy complexion, waxy thickened nose and
eyelids, deep-set, listless, lacklustre eyebrows, and thick prominent
lips comprise the catalogue of the physiognomy. On the whole, the sort
of face one passes in the street as stupid and common. But there are
a number of fascinating and marvelous varieties of the stupid and
common.
The adrenal face is most often dark or freckled. It tends to be
irregularly broadish. It is hairy, one is struck forcibly. There is a
low hair line, which makes the brow appear rather low, and there is
a good deal of hair over the cheek bones. The adrenal type is round
headed.
The face of the hyperpituitary is striking and pretty sharply defined.
It is long and narrow, with a tendency to prominence of the bony
parts. Square, protruding jaw, high, thin, straight nose, emphasized
eyebrows, and marked cheek-bones, comprise the leading points in its
composition. On the other hand, the subpituitary is more rounded and
trends toward the full moon effect, the chin recedes, the cheek-bones
are buried under fat, the nose spreads more and is flatter. In its
general expression, there is a complacence and tranquillity which is
often mistaken for sleepiness, and often actually is dullness.
The eunuchoid face is usually fat with puffy eyelids. The skin is
smooth and cool, marble-like often, poor in pigment and color.
Sometimes it is sallow, wrinkled and senile in a man in his early
twenties. At others, it is distinctly feminine in its hairlessness,
and the delicate texture of the skin, as well as in the clean-cut
patterning of the features. Every gradient between premature senility
and sex inversion is encountered.
The thymic face frequently stamps its possessor at sight. Its owner
has a smooth, soft skin, with little or no hair, and a dead white or
"peaches-and-cream" complexion. One wonders, when unacquainted with
the type, who the man's barber is, or where he learned to shave
himself so well. It may be curiously velvety to the touch and swept by
a faint sheen. Among children occur the most exquisite samples of the
kind designated as the angelic child. The face is finely moulded and
beautifully proportioned, features artistically chiselled, eyes blue
or brown with long lashes, cheeks transparent with rapid, fleeting
variations in coloring, thin lips, and oval chin. In the adult, the
chin is receding, and the mouth seems underdeveloped in one variety.
THE TEETH
As closely connected with the internal secretions as are the bones of
the face and the skull are the teeth. Tooth formation is essentially a
modified bone formation. And as the bones of the face are influenced,
so are the teeth influenced. But as each tooth is a miniature organ,
inspectable by the eye as a unit, the action of the ductless glands
is more obviously reflected for the observer to read. By their teeth
shall ye know them. Upon the whole history of the evolution of each
tooth, in the growth of the dental follicle and its walls, the
fruition of the dentinal germ, the making of the enamel organ, the
dental pulp, the cementum and the peridental membrane, the endocrines
leave their mark.
There are certain general statements about the teeth and the internal
secretions that can be made. The teeth of the thyroid types are
pearly, glistening, small and regular; in other words, the teeth to
which poets have devoted sonnets. The pituitary types have teeth that
are large and square and irregular, with prominence of the middle
incisors, and a marked separation or crowding of them. The
interstitial types have small irregular upper teeth, with turned,
stumpy or missing lateral incisors. The thymus types have youthful,
milky white teeth that are thin and translucent, and scalloped or
crescentic at the grinding edge. The teeth of the adrenal type are all
well-developed, tend to have a yellowish color, with a reddish tinge
to the grinding surfaces.
The degree and regularity of development of the middle upper cutting,
biting teeth, as distinguished from the grinding molars, the middle
and lateral incisors, and the canines offer further guides to the
endocrine constitution analysis. The size of the central incisors
seems to be directly proportional to the degree of pituitary
predominance. On the other hand, the size and regularity of
the lateral incisors seem proportional to the influence of the
interstitial cells. When these are inferior in the make-up of an
individual, the lateral incisors are nearly always distorted. The
size of the canines appears to be a measure of adrenal activity. Long
sharply pointed canines mean well-functioning adrenal gland equipment
to start in with, inherited from a bellicose progenitor.
No individual peculiarities of the teeth are accidental. Just as the
absence of hair on the face in a man or a moustache effect in a
woman stand for some definite stress or strain in the mechanics of
interaction of the internal secretions, so likewise do variations in
dentition, as to the time of eruption of the teeth, their position and
quality, and their resistance to decay.
Proper balance between the thymus and pituitary will permit the
eruption of the teeth within the normal time limits, both the milk
teeth and the permanent teeth. When there is equilibrium between the
pituitary and the gonads, the teeth will be regular in shape and
position. Carious teeth, in children and adults, sometimes indicate
endocrine imbalance. Thyroid and adrenal balance determines the
resistance to decay of the molars. Early decay of the molars in
children is significant of insufficiency of the thyroid. When the
first permanent molar, which should appear in the upper arch in its
usual position between the sixth or eighth years, does not, there has
been a prenatal disturbance of the pituitary, according to Chayes
and others. Rapid decay of the teeth in childhood should always call
attention to the parathyroids.
In pregnancy, the teeth suffer particularly because of disturbances of
the endocrines. The saying, "A tooth for every child," is said to have
its equivalent in every language. The bicuspids and second permanent
molars erupt around puberty, when profound readjustments are going on
among the glands of internal secretion. They consequently suffer with
their abnormalities or divergences from type. The teeth thus furnish a
good deal of information concerning the distribution of the balance of
power among the hormones.
THE SKIN
The skin is influenced in its color, moisture, hairiness, texture, fat
content and disease vulnerability by the endocrines. The question of
color is very interesting, for it is probably the expression of the
blending action of the different internal secretions. Davenport, the
American student of heredity and eugenics, has shown that neither
white nor black skins are either perfectly white or perfectly black,
but are mixtures in various proportions of black, yellow, red and
white. The exact percentages of the pigments in each particular skin,
can be determined by means of a rotating disc. Thus a white person's
skin may have the following composition:
Black 8% Red 50%
Yellow 9% White 33%
The composition of the skin of a very black negro may be:
Black 68% Red 26%
Yellow 2% White 7%
Now the fact that in Addison's disease in which the adrenals are
destroyed there occurs a coincident increase in the black in the
skin, and other evidence pointing to adrenal implication in dark
complexioned white people, as well as in those possessing pigmented
spots, seems to indicate the adrenals as controllers of the black
and white factors. Davenport has concluded that there are two double
factors for black pigmentation in the full-blooded negro which are
separately inheritable. The determinants of the red and yellow have
still to be worked out.
The moistness of the skin, as perspiration, depends upon the number
and activity of the sweat glands. It varies with the water content of
the body, the state of the vegetative nervous system, and the body
temperature. Thus the skin of the hyperthyroid and the subadrenal
is soft and moist, because of their antagonistic effects upon the
sympathetic system. The subthyroid and the hyperadrenal have dry
and harsh skins for the same reason, if no other glands intervene.
However, in both of the latter, if there is a persistent thymus, the
skin will retain the bland quality of adolescence.
There is a curious variation among the different internal secretion
types in the reaction of the skin to stroking. When the skin,
especially the skin over the shoulders, the breasts and the abdomen,
is stroked with some blunt object, the blood vessels react either by a
greater filling up or emptying of themselves. The latter occurs most
regularly in the subadrenal types, the former in the hyperthyroid.
Both forms of reaction run parallel to the different check or drive
effects of the vegetative apparatus. With too much drive, that is, too
much thyroid, there is the flushing reaction; with too little check,
that is, with too little adrenal, there is the whitening. These
differences probably explain the emotional reactions of the face. In
anger, for example, some people become a dead white, others a fiery
red. Whether one will do one or the other may depend upon the relative
predominance of the thyroid or of adrenal in the individual.
In the distribution of fat beneath and throughout the skin all of the
endocrine glands appear to have a voice. The typically hyperthyroid
and hyperpituitary individuals tend to be thin, as well also as those
who have well-functioning or excessively functional interstitial
cells. In all of these the administration of the respective internal
secretions increases the burning up of material in the body, and all
of them have a higher rate of tissue combustion than their confreres,
with a subthyroid or subpituitary keynote in their cell chemistry, or
with insufficient interstitial cell action. Generally the latter have
a very dry skin, the former a moist skin. With delayed involution of
the pineal, obesity results.
The elasticity of the skin is another quality that varies with the
concentration in the blood of the internal secretions. Elasticity of
the skin, its recoil upon being stretched like a rubber band, may be
taken as a measure of the activity of all the endocrine glands. For,
as can be noticed especially upon the back of the hand, the older a
man grows, the less elastic becomes the skin. In older people, raising
the skin upon the back of the hand will cause it to stand up as a
ridge for a few seconds and then slowly to return to the level of the
surrounding skin. Whereas in a youthful person it will quickly snap
back into place. This quality of elasticity of the skin is due to the
presence in it of the so-called yellow elastic fibres, cell products,
with a resilience greater than anything devised by man. The
preservation of the resilience is a function of the internal
secretions. Thus, after loss of the thyroid, the ridging effect
characteristic of senility can be produced in one young as measured by
his years. It has been said that a man is as old as his arteries, and
also that as he is as old as his skin. It might better be said that he
is as old as his elastic tissue, young when he is rich in it, old when
poor and losing it. And as elastic tissue and internal secretions
stand in the relation of created and creators, or at least preserved
and preservers, a man may be said to be as old, that is as young,
fresh and active as his ductless glands.
THE HAIR
There is no characteristic of the human body, except perhaps
the teeth, more influenced in its quality, texture, amount and
distribution than the hair. And again, each of the glands of internal
secretion plays a part, but most importantly the thyroid, the
suprarenal cortex and the interstitial sex glands. All contribute
their specific effect, and the blend, the sum of the additions and
subtractions constituting their influences, appears as a specific
trait of the individual, a trait so significant as to be used by the
professionals absorbed in the study of man, the anthropologists, as a
criterion of racial classifications.
Some acquaintance with the history of the normal growth of hair is
necessary to its understanding. There develops during the life of the
fetus within the womb a curious sort of wooly hair everywhere over
the entire body (excepting the palms and soles which remain hairless
throughout life), remarkably soft and fluttery--the lanugo. At about
the eighth month of intra-uterine existence, a good deal of this
lanugo is lost, to be replaced on the head and eyebrows by a crop of
thick, coarse, pigmented real hair. So it happens that at birth the
infant's hair is a queerly irregular growth, a mixture of what is left
of the general lanugo development, and the localized patches of the
more human hair. Until puberty this children's hair remains the same,
although at times, particularly after dentition, and after infectious
diseases which undoubtedly alter the relations of the internal
secretions, changes of color and texture occur. Then, with sexual
ripening, there appear in males the so-called terminal hairs, over the
cheeks and lips and chin, and, in both sexes, in the folds under
the shoulders and over the lower abdomen, the hair which might be
distinguished as the sex hair in contradistinction to the juvenile
hair of the head, the extremities and the back.
Now the smoothness of the face in children is connected with the
activity of the thymus and pineal glands. Among individuals in whom
the juvenile thymus persists after puberty, no growth of hair occurs
on the face, and in precocious involution or destruction of the
pineal, hair appears on the face and in other terminal regions in
children of six or less, a symptom classical in the child who suffered
from a tumor of the pineal, and discussed immortality with his
physicians. It is probable that these thymus and pineal effects are
indirect through their action upon the sex glands. For in the types
with persistent juvenile thymus there occurs a maldevelopment of the
sex glands, while in those with early pineal recession the sex glands
bloom simultanously with the appearance of adolescent hair and mental
traits. The hastening of sexual hair by tumors of the adrenal gland
may also be put down to a release from restraint of the interstitial
sex cells.
There are certain spheres in the hair geography of the body, over
which particular glands may be said to rule or to possess a mandate.
The hair of the head seems to be primarily under the control of
the thyroid. Thus in cretins reconstructed by thyroid feeding, the
straight, rather animal hair becomes lustrous and fine, silken and
curly. In the thyroid deficiency of adults, a prominent phenomenon
often is the falling out of the hair in handfuls. Baldness is
frequently associated with a progressive decrease of the concentration
of thyroid in the blood. At the same time, there tends to be a
thinning of the eyebrows, especially of the outer third.
The hair of the face in males, and the other terminal hairs in both
males and females, is regulated by the sex glands primarily. In the
female, the ovary, that is to say, the interstitial cells of the
ovary, inhibit the growth of hair upon the face. In destructive
disease of the ovaries, as well as in other affections of it, hair in
the form of moustache, beard and whiskers may appear in female. That
is why in women after the grand sex change of life, the menopause,
hair often grows in the typically male regions because of loss of the
inhibiting influence of the ovarian internal secretion upon them.
After castration of the ovaries, the same may result. Removal of the
male sex glands, or disturbances of them, will interfere with the
proper development of the normal facial hair. Of the hair of the
chest, the abdomen and the back, the adrenals seem to be the
controllers. Adrenal types have hairy chests in males, and hair on the
back in females. They have also a good deal of hair upon the abdomen.
The hair on the extremities varies a good deal with the pituitary.
People with hair upon hands, arms and legs, alone, are generally
pituitary, or have a striking pituitary streak in their make-up.
When the adrenals increase in size in childhood, a remarkable triad
follows--general hairiness, adiposity and sexual precocity. One fact
should be noted. When the adrenals evoke precocity, and an early
awakening of the secondary sex characteristics, it is a masculine
precocity, and an approximation to the masculine even in females.
There is a definite trend toward an increase of the male in the
individual's composition at the expense of the female. We shall have
to consider this in greater detail when we analyze the internal
secretion basis of masculinity and femininity. In general, the degree
of general hairiness is an index to the amount of adrenal influence
upon the organism. All the endocrines which affect the hair growth
also act upon the sebaceous glands which oil the skin.
THE EYES
Eyes present clues to internal secretion constitutions dependent upon
influences of architecture and function. The thyroid eye is typical.
It is large, brilliant and protruding. The individual is "pop-eyed."
On the other hand, subthyroidized eyes tend to be sunken and
lustreless. The eyes of a pituitary type are either set markedly
apart, or close together, with the hair at the root of the nose so
prominent as to constitute a separate bridge known as the nasal brow.
The size of the pupil, and its humidity, which have so much to do with
the expression of the eye, vary directly with the activities of the
driving and checking divisions of the vegetative system, and are
a pretty good index as to which, at the time of observation, is
predominant. When the check system is in control, the pupils are large
and dilated. When its antagonist and rival, the drive system, is on
top, the pupils are small and contracted. The reactions of the pupils
when charged by strong emotion, like fear or anger, likewise turn upon
the status of check or drive internal secretions in the economy of the
organism at the time the exciting agent presents itself.
MUSCLES
It would seem, at first sight, that organs like muscles, mechanical
instruments for the manipulation of the organism in space, would
be more or less independent of the subtler processes of internal
chemistry of the blood and tissues. But no assumption would be more
beside the mark. Just as much as the bones and viscera, the teeth and
the hair, they show grossly how they are being influenced by all the
endocrine glands. So thyroid types generally have a skeleton
sparsely covered with a muscular mantle. Pituitary types have large
well-developed muscles. The pineal gland has some definite relation to
muscle chemistry not yet probed. Thus, it has been shown that when the
pineal has been completely destroyed prematurely by lime deposits in
it, there is concomitant a wasting of muscles in places. This waste is
sometimes replaced by fat. Pictures and images in wood and stone
of these muscle freaks dating from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth century are in existence. Then there is the extraordinary
fatigability of the muscles which occurs in the thymus types,
who nevertheless have large well-rounded muscles, a paradox of
contradiction between anatomy and physiology. Such a type, for
instance, may be picked out by a football coach for an important
position in a line-up, simply on the tremendous impressiveness of
the muscle make-up, only to see him bowled over and out in the first
scrimmage. The tone of muscles, the quality of resisting firmness or
yielding softness, is essentially determined by the adrenal glands,
especially in time of stress and strain.
Brown-Sequard was the first to show that extracts of sex glands could
increase the capacity for muscular work. Whether this was a direct
effect upon the muscles, or indirect through the nerves or other
endocrines, no one can say. Certainly the carriage of an individual,
outer symptom of the inner tonus among his muscles and tendons, may be
said to be as distinctively an endocrine affair as the color of his
skin. And like its variations, variations of their tone, development,
reactivity, fatigability, and endurance may be traced to corresponding
states of overaction, or underaction, and odd combinations of the
different hormones. Much remains to be learned about them and the
manner of their control. Such an affliction as flatfoot, dependent
upon a laxity of the ligaments in one who seems perfectly healthy and
strong, may lead the analyst back to a thymus-centered personality.
That is but one example.
Since, too, muscle attitudes, muscle tensions and muscle relaxations
play so large a part in the production of fundamental mental states:
the attitudes, moods, memories and will reactions, the vegetative
apparatus enters, to play its part as a determinant.
SEX
Over no domain of the body have the endocrines a more absolute
mandatory than over that of the whole complex of sex. Both as regards
the primary reproductive organs, their size and shape, and the
character of their implantation, malformations and anomalies, as well
as the physical and mental traits lumped as the secondary sexual,
puberty, maturity, and senility, voice changes and erotic trends,
virility and femininity, the internal secretions are dictators at
every step. So significant are these, that even a rough summary of the
discoveries and the outlook in the field involves some consideration
of the details.
CHAPTER VI
THE MECHANICS OF THE MASCULINE AND THE FEMININE
It needs a poet to chant the epic of sex. The mystery of it puzzled
the minds of the earliest Sumerian thinkers. As a source of deepest
excitement, it generated the most revolting ceremonies, bizarre
customs, astounding cruelties and incomprehensible stupidities of
the race. Men and women, as soon as they have done with their usual
business of keeping themselves free of disagreeable sensations,
hunger, cold, fear of enemies, betake themselves to it as a primary
interest all over the world. The most advanced psychologists of the
day link the sex impulse with the windings and twistings of all human
activity.
Yet the Homer of sex through the ages is still to come. But at all
times the mystery evoked speculation and attempt at explanation.
Acting upon their theories as to the nature and function of sex, men
have, ever since the passing of the primeval matriarchates, segregated
women, equalized them, worshipped them, or enslaved them. Opinions
have varied from ancient national aphorisms to the effect that
women have no souls to the most ultramodern utterances of
biologist-publicists that the differences between men and women are
the differences between two species. There are other epigrams, vast
sweeping generalities, extant concerning the nature of sex, and women
particularly. All partake of the complexity of truth and therefore own
a certain validity. Still, since as a matter of fact, these items have
been based upon superficial observations colored by the tradition and
verbiage of the milieu, they are valuable more as human documents, as
material for the psychologist, than as scientifically obtained data,
able to stand unblinking before the rays of the critical searchlights.
SCIENCE VS. ART
Not that all the vast accumulation needs to be thrown pell-mell,
higgledy-piggledy into the discard. The love lyrics of the poet, the
magic of the emotions of Shelley and Poe, for instance, with their
marvelous music and exquisite intonings of feeling, furnish us with
important information. They are the facts of the sex life, as much as
the song of the nightingale, or the mocking laughter of the cuckoo
pursued by its mate. So Sappho and Elizabeth Browning, to take only
two samples, have contributed some of the feminine reaction. The
erotic motive in literature has but paralleled the erotic motive in
life, with all of its vagaries, delusions, confusions, ecstasies and
suffering.
We have had concerning sex not knowledge, but a series of attitudes,
the attitude of virtue, the attitude of pruriency, the attitude of
good taste, the attitude of the theoretic libertine, the attitude of
the satyr's vulgarity. All these poses, of course, have supplied not
an iota to an understanding of the foundations of the problems of sex,
biologically considered. Thus, a masculine master has coined that
immortal phrase, the Eternal Feminine. And in a matriarchate we
should undoubtedly hear of the Eternal Masculine. Each leaves one as
unenlightened as the other. A rough and ready code of life attributes
certain grossly characteristic qualities of mind and body to each
sex. This is supposed to be enough for common sense. Beyond that the
mystery has been wrapped in cotton wool. That perhaps explains the
enormous popularity of contemporary pornographic and so-called sex
literature.
There are bound up with sex feeling and sex knowledge many customs,
beliefs and habits, many legal statutes and social institutions, in
the complex that is called sentiment, to which science looms as the
sacrilegious ogre who devours romance. Without spending space upon the
ravages of the sentimental idealist, certainly responsible for as much
human disaster as the brutal realist, it is manifest that a revolution
in sex standards and relations is inevitable as soon as the new
doctrines filter down as matters of fact to the levels of the common
intelligence. And surely, nothing else could be wished for in the
world desired by all of us, the world ruled by intelligence, and
intelligent good will.
SEX CHEMISTRY
A few general statements may be put down outright as material to go
upon before we proceed to details.
1. Femininity and masculinity have a definite chemical basis in the
reactions of the internal secretions of which they are the expression.
That is to say, that just as a precipitate of chalk is formed when one
throws some carbonate of soda into lime water, so the masculine
and the feminine are to be looked upon as precipitates and
crystallizations of a long series of linked chemical reactions in
the fluids of the body, in which the internal secretions play a
determining part.
2. Femininity and masculinity are expressions of the interplay of all
the internal secretions. It used to be said by smart cats and accepted
by the tabby cats, that a woman was a woman because of her ovaries
alone. It is being said by some great discoverers of the day that man
is a man because of his testes alone. Neither of these dogmas is true.
There are individuals with ovaries who show every deviation from the
feminine and there are individuals with testes who exhibit every
variation from the masculine. The other endocrine glands are of equal
importance.
3. There is no absolute masculine or absolute feminine. The ideals
of the Manly Man and the Womanly Woman were erected by the blind
ignorance of the nineteenth century illusionists, and a line drawn to
cleave them. But indeed biologically there exists every transition
between the masculine and the feminine. The explanation of these
different sex types consists in the different admixtures of the
internal secretions possible and actual. When we speak of the feminine
we really mean the predominantly feminine. And when we speak of
the masculine, we mean the mainly masculine. Between, all sorts of
transitions are possible and occur.
Man in relation to the internal secretions we have considered in
reviewing the interstitial cells. To him, we shall return later. Let
us turn now to that fascinating subject of the ages, Woman. What
produces and maintains the Feminine?
THE CAUSE OF SEX
To all appearances, that inscrutable simplest of living things, the
fertilized ovum, beginning of the human, starts bisexual, double
sexed, both masculine and feminine, or perhaps neither masculine nor
feminine. Then a form develops. Then within that form a patch of cells
arise which the microscopist recognizes as the forerunners of the male
or the female reproductive cells. Then some more development. And at
birth, sex is definitely settled, as far as the reproductive organs
are concerned.
Our knowledge here, as everywhere, is still fragmentary. Statistical
reviews seem to show that in times of stress, war, famine, pestilence,
more boys are born than girls. But that is neither here nor there. It
sheds no further light on the subject. Monosexuality is a distinction
of the human species: the sexes are pretty clearly differentiated.
In some animals, such as some worms, there is a bisexuality of the
individual. There are present the reproductive organs of both sexes,
capable of impregnating other individuals as well as of being
impregnated. In some of these, even self-impregnation may occur. This
is the condition of hermaphroditism.
But the higher up one goes in the scale of evolution, the greater
becomes the distinction between the sexes. Anatomic hermaphroditism
becomes a rare anomaly. Life appears to have perfected this trick of
separate sexes, sex specialization, in short, for the sake of the
efficiency which goes with specialization.
When a germ cell divides, its nuclear material breaks up into segments
known as chromosomes. Now it has been found, for example in the case
of the common squash bug, anasa tristis, that there are 22 chromosomes
in the female, and 21 in the male. In the female two of these are
visibly different from the rest, while in the male there is one odd
one, the remaining 20 being like the corresponding 20 of the female.
Before the germ cell becomes fit to mix with a germ cell of opposite
sex, in the process of fertilization, it must lose one half of these.
So the number of chromosomes for the species is kept the same or
constant. This is the process of maturation. In the process, when the
chromosome number is halved among the females, 11 go into each mature
egg. But among the males, the odd chromosome, also known as the
X-chromosome, can perforce go only into half of the sperm cells,
leaving the others without it. So the sperm are formed in equal
numbers of 10 and 11 chromosomes respectively.
When fertilization occurs, and the sperm cell fuses with the egg, the
following may take place: (1) a ten chromosome sperm may unite with
the eleven chromosome egg, and produce a twenty-one chromosome
individual or (2) an eleven chromosome sperm may unite with an eleven
chromosome egg producing a twenty-two chromosome individual. It has
been found that the twenty-two chromosome individual invariably
develops into a female, and the twenty-one into a male. Therefore,
femaleness is a positive quality, dependent upon the action of the
X-chromosome, and maleness an absence of femaleness, due to lack
of the extra, odd chromosome. In man, two X-chromosomes have been
discovered, half the sperm containing 12, and the other half
containing only 10 chromosomes. The number of chromosomes in human
cells consequently is 22 in the male and 24 in the female.
The X-chromosome is the bearer of sex destiny. There still remains the
work to be done on the actual control of sex by man, apart from its
natural determination. For the time being, let the feminists glory in
the fact that they have two more chromosomes to each cell than
their opponents. Certainly there can be no talk here of a natural
inferiority of women.
THE SECONDARY OR ENDOCRINE SEX TRAITS
Yet the matter is after all not so simple as this would make it out
to be. All that can be safely laid down is that the character of the
reproductive organs is determined by the extra chromosomes. And though
these reproductive organs have a good deal to do with the masculine or
feminine quality of the organism as a whole, through their internal
secretions, they are not alone. All the other internal secretions have
their say in the final outcome, determining what may be called the
dominant sex quality, but leaving inherent the latent soil of the
other sex. This may become active and dominant in its turn, under
certain conditions of stimulation, abnormality, or disease, dependent
upon a rearrangement of status and influence among the ductless
glands. Bisexuality preceded monosexuality in the animal pedigree, and
co-exists with it even at the highest points of the genealogical tree.
While from the standpoint of the species, the criterion of the sex
classification of its members will depend upon their capacity to
fertilize or to be fertilized, a quality that may, therefore, be
spoken of as the primary sex character, a number of other traits have
been evolved by sexual selection, the secondary sex traits. They have
come to be just as important, to the individual, as far as his or her
consciousness of sex attitudes and reactions to it are concerned. The
terms primary and secondary sex characteristics, though inapt, must be
allowed to stand.
These accessory sex-serving traits undoubtedly survived because of
their usefulness in external adornment for attracting attention in
courtship, in the metabolic requirements of sex combat and the sex
act, and in the necessities of caring for the young, until well-grown.
The rooster's comb and spurs, the male frog's claspers, the stag's
antlers, and so on, are familiarly and obviously so useful. Besides
there are fundamental differences in inner physiology. The human male
consumes more oxygen than the female per minute, since he has more red
corpuscles in his blood. In some caterpillars the blood is yellow in
the males and green in the females. W.I. Thomas has devoted an essay
of some fifty pages to a review of the organic differences between man
and woman. The ordinary criteria, employed every day by the man in the
street to distinguish man from woman may be arranged as follows:
_Man_ _Woman_
Hair on face Hairless face
Skin coarse and lean Skin fine and plump
Muscles powerful Relatively weak
Bones heavy Bones light
Aggressive--bass voice Reserved--treble voice
THE ROLE OF THE OVARIES
While the primary sex characters, as such, are present and
distinguishable from birth, quite the opposite holds for the secondary
sex traits. During childhood they are in abeyance or at least pretty
sharply suppressed. Girls and boys who are permitted to dress alike,
to play the same games and among whom no consciousness of sex is
encouraged are often difficult to tell apart. The boys will be boys,
and most of the girls tom-boys.
With puberty comes a marked change of attitude toward the other sex.
Puberty is the time of ripening of the specific germ cells. It is
then the ovaries begin to secrete ova ripe for fertilization, and the
testes begin to secrete sperm ready to fertilize. Before this can
happen an event announced in the female by the onset of menstruation,
two conditions must be fulfilled in the endocrine history of the
individual. There must be a certain atrophy and retrogression of
the thymus gland, and there must likewise be a similar atrophy and
retirement of the pineal gland. Both of these involutions of the
glands of childhood must occur before the normal hypertrophy and
development of the sex glands and their secretions can start. Besides,
there must be a minimum activity of the thyroid, adrenal and pituitary
glands. Without them, below a certain minimum, the reproductive organs
and their secretions will remain infantile, causing a persistent
infantilism or delay of puberty.
Formerly there was ascribed to the ovaries, in a lump and without
qualification, an absolute despotism over the specifically feminine
functions of menstruation, gestation, parturition, and lactation.
Nowadays, we see its domain as a limited monarchy, if not indeed as
one sovereign state of a republic, a member equal but not superior to
the others of a board of directors. Its true business comes down to
two particular roles: first, the production of ova, and, second, the
secretion of a hormone or hormones. Over the other functions once
supposed its monopoly, all the ductless glands rule.
What concerns us now is its internal secretion or secretions. One of
them is known as lutein and it has never been chemically isolated
in its pure form. The existence of lutein, like the existence of
electricity, is an inference, something we are sure is there because
of its effects. It originates in a remarkable part of the ovary, the
corpus luteum. Besides, there are the products of the interstitial
cells, the creations of a special layer of cells around the ovum, the
membrana granulosa. They produce a substance tonic to the uterus.
When the ovaries are removed, there occurs an atrophy of the womb
muscle, due to loss of this tonic substance. This atrophy, accompanied
by an abolition of the normal periodic uterine contraction, makes
conditions unfavorable to pregnancy. It has been claimed that the
secretion of the corpus luteum is necessary for the complete progress
of a pregnancy. Cases are on record, however, of ovaries taken out
soon after the onset of pregnancy, without interference with the
gestation.
Castration is comparable in every way with the menopause or the
time of cessation of sexual life, a process that might be called
self-castration. It produces certain general constitutional effects.
Adiposity often develops, undoubtedly associated with underfunction of
the thyroid and pituitary glands. The woman breathes less oxygen per
minute and burns up less food and tissue. There is some disturbance
of the lime balance with an increased excitability of the vegetative
nervous system. Concomitant is the release of some brake upon the
blood pressure mechanisms, so that a family tendency to high blood
pressure will flare up. Some women are rendered unstable by the
process, others are completely transformed, and still others adapt
themselves, with little or no discomfort, to the new situation. The
response to the revolution in the cell-republic of the castrate by
the other endocrines, the thyroid, the pituitary, and the adrenals,
determines which it is to be.
For normally, with feminine puberty, there is an increased activity of
the thyroid, the posterior pituitary and the adrenal medulla. These
changes indeed constitute the formula of normal feminization. In the
male, the ripening of the testes is accompanied or perhaps preceded by
augmented function of the adrenal cortex and the anterior pituitary.
This difference in biochemistry accounts for the contrast between the
sexes in the skin, hair, fat, cartilage (voice) and bone changes.
Ovary and adrenal medulla and posterior pituitary and thyroid
predominance constitute the feminine formula. Testis and adrenal
cortex and anterior pituitary predominance comprise the masculine
endocrine directorate.
THE REACTIONS OF THE OTHER GLANDS
As in so many other aspects, the facts about the various influences
exerted by the endocrine glands upon the reproductive system are
complicated and disjointed. A chink of light has been let in upon a
dark cave, and slowly the chink will widen. But the gross effects are
clear.
Around the ovary and the uterus, the endocrines gyrate as the planets
around the sun. The ovary is the organ for the preservation and
maturation of the germ plasm, that treasure which the body is built
but to cherish and hand on as a sacred heirloom. The ova, the female
egg cells, are the fundamental concern of the ovary. Secondarily, it
secretes its messengers to keep the rest of the body, and particularly
the other endocrines, in touch with the necessities of the adventures
of these ova. It is thus enabled to bend every force and power at its
command to the service of the reproductive instinct.
In learning their role so well in the course of evolution, the
thyroid, the pituitary and the suprarenal have become indispensable
stimulants (in various degrees peculiar to the individual), to the
primary function of the ovary. As a consequence, to hold the sex
stimulating glands in check, there had to appear others, restraining
them and so preventing sex precocity. These are the thymus and pineal.
So closely are they all related that insufficient action of the
thyroid, pituitary or adrenals may cause atrophy of the ovaries
and uterus, with abolition of genital function. If the sex glands
themselves fail, as occurs usually in most women sometime in the
forties, the thyroid-pituitary-adrenal association must readjust
itself to the new development. The adaptation evokes the phenomena of
the transition to a new life, the climacteric.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PUBERTY
Tracing the development of sex life there is a certain order of events
in a normal history. Before puberty, the ova have lain asleep, as it
were, in a cocoon state. Now with puberty they awaken. And with them
all those profound mechanisms and inventions that have to do with
their nutrition up to ripening. Then revolve the cycles that are
translated as menstruation, the propulsion, fertilization and
implantation of the ova in the uterus,--the full development of the
fetus,--its birth, and feeding after birth--all of which are ductless
gland controlled.
Samuel Butler once noted that:
"All our limbs and sensual organs, in fact, our whole body and life,
are but an accretion round and a fostering of the spermatozoa. They
are the real "He." A man's eyes, ears, tongue, nose, legs and arms
are but so many organs and tools that minister to the protection,
education, increased intelligence and multiplication of the
spermatozoa, so that our whole life is in reality a series of complex
efforts in respect of these, conscious or unconscious according
to their comparative commonness. They are the central fact in our
existence, the point towards which all effort is directed."
Nothing could be said more truly of Woman, and the ova she carries.
All that transpires during pubescence is symptomatic of the underlying
tidal stir in the cells. The uterus becomes gorged with blood
periodically, to provide an enriched soil for the perhaps to be
fertilized ovum to plant itself. The breasts grow, and fat is
deposited in particular places as reserve material for the making of
milk. The qualities which are to appeal to the eye and ear and even
nostrils of the male appear. Instincts dawn, an independence of spirit
germinates, emulsified with a curious shyness and coyness and a
desperate loneliness and secrecy. And all because there have been let
loose in the blood from the glands of internal secretion the chemical
substances that set going the clockwork of sequential incidents
elaborated and repeated through countless aeons of time.
FEMININE PRECOCITY
Ordinarily, in the north temperate climate, puberty begins about
the fourteenth year, but may begin anywhere from the tenth to the
sixteenth. Feeding and environment indirectly, the state of the
internal secretions as a whole directly, determine this. In girls,
those definite signs, menstruation and the growth of the breasts,
before the age of ten, mean premature awakening of the ovaries and a
concomitant co-reaction of the other endocrines, creating the ensemble
of maturity.
In females, the primary stimulus, the initial spark of femininity,
must originate in the ovary. There are other forms of precocity in the
female, dependent upon stimulations of other glands, but these forms
are masculinisms, a masculinization of the personality, and not a
true awakening of the feminine constitution. So one must distinguish
sharply between a precocity by masculinization and precocity of
premature feminization. The latter always implies the touch of the
fairy's wand upon the sleeping ovaries. Sexual precocity in boys may
be produced by a premature overactivity not only of the specific
reproductive organs: the testes, but also by an early excess of
secretion on the part of the cortex of the adrenal gland or the
pituitary gland, or by a too early involution of the pineal or thymus.
When such abnormalities of adrenal, pituitary, thymus or pineal occur
in girls, it is the masculine streak in the hastening of growth that
is made manifest. All this emphasizes the relative bisexuality of
every normal, no matter how pronounced, when superficially viewed, his
or her form of predominating sex may be. Under the right conditions
recession of the most marked virility or femininity becomes
conceivable, and occurs.
THE SECRET OF THE MASCULINE
Masculinization having entered upon the scene, one may well ask: what
truly (which means chemically) lies behind all these differences
and divergences between male and female? What is the secret of the
variable internal secretion admixtures? You can tell us that the
recipes are different, the ingredients different, the results
different as a Nesselrode pudding is from, say, a rice pudding. But
what is the inner mechanism of the process? Since the masculine and
the feminine are but expressions of certain relative capacities and
potentialities, some single principle must run through the making of
both.
Recognizing of course the qualifications inherent in so broad a
statement the answer is: the handling of the lime salts. Life
originated, or at least lived and worked for long ages in sea water.
During these eras the salts of the sea have come to play a dominant
role in its being. The lime salts, because of their peculiar
properties of dissolving or precipitating themselves according to
electrical conditions in their medium, have come to occupy a
central position in all the processes of growth, metabolism and sex
differentiation. So it is that masculinity may be described as a
stable, constant state in the organism of lime salts, and the feminine
as an unstable, variable state of lime salts. The male skeleton
contrasts with the female as the stronger, larger, heavier and
straighter because it is an expression of a greater capacity to
utilize, store and keep lime in the system. Women throughout their
reproductive period are liable to rapid and pendulum-like fluctuations
of their lime content.
Menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, all draw upon the stores of lime,
sometimes depleting them to the point of softening of the bones and
wrecking the whole skeleton. The endocrines control the transport,
and course, combinations and permutations in the history of lime's
progress among the cells, and are in turn themselves affected by it.
Man is relatively free of these liabilities, and so remains man by
his freedom from the recurrent crises involving the lime salt reserve
which constitute the essence of the life story of woman.
THE SEX INDEX
It follows from these considerations that when it becomes necessary
to size the sex composition of a man or woman, a measurement becomes
establishable which may be spoken of as the sex index. To be able to
say of Mr. Llewylln Jones that he is sixty per cent masculine and
forty per cent feminine, or of Mrs. Worthington that she is seventy
per cent feminine and thirty per cent masculine would be of the utmost
value under all kinds of circumstances. Unfortunately, lacking as we
do the exact figures of an advanced blood chemistry (yet in its most
infantile infancy) a direct indexing of the sort is impossible. But it
is certainly conceivable, along the lines of measurement suggested
by the Binet tests and others, that a scale of evaluation of the
secondary sex traits may be elaborated, which would turn out as
valuable in understanding the frictions of the individual, and more
concretely, that aspect of it to which pathologists of the mind are
tracing so much needless misery and suffering: maladjusted sexuality,
expressed and suppressed. Nothing will contribute more to harmonious
adjustment for these sufferers than recognition of the fact that we
are all, more or less, partial hermaphrodites.
THE FUNCTIONAL HERMAPHRODITE
The complete or total hermaphrodite we define as the individual who
possesses the reproductive organs of the male and the female, both
testes and ovaries. So rare is such a combination in man that for a
long time its occurrence was doubted, descriptions of it regarded as
myth. However, undoubted cases are on record, examined by the most
careful of observers, of ovo-testis or mixed reproductive organs.
Strangely enough, the history of these cases, shows that at one time
the masculine set, and at another the feminine set, will hold sway
over the sex traits and functions. Blending does not happen.
Rare though the true hermaphrodite may be, the partial hermaphrodite
is relatively frequent. The mixed ensemble of the directly contrasting
type, such as the concomitance of testes with feminine secondary sex
traits, or of ovaries with masculine sex traits, have been described
from time immemorial as freaks. Occurring even more frequently is the
mixed sex ensemble, in which the type of reproductive organs and of
secondary sex traits run roughly parallel, emulsified with certain
traits of the opposite sex. Physical features of one sex, instincts
and mental attitudes of the other co-exist in the same individual by
reason of an excess in one direction or a deficiency in another of the
internal secretions. The degree of masculine trend in a woman is a
crude measure of adrenal domination, the degree of feminine deviation
in a man is roughly proportional to the amount of pituitary influences
in his make-up.
Whether one or the other sex tendency will dominate depends upon the
quantity of sex hormone divergence from the ideal normal. But also
determinant are the environment stimuli provoking excessive or
deficient secretory reactions from the other endocrines involved,
through the vegetative nervous system. Such especially are the
associates of the mixed sex individual. Ordinarily the combative male
and the submissive female are differentiated by contrasts of skin
and hair, fat and bone structure. The combative male is built as a
fighting machine, the submissive female as an organism of attractive
grace and beauty for impregnation and parturition. When one sees the
fragile woman aggressive, the masculinoid woman submissive, one
may infer an education of experience that has brought the usually
recessive glands into the foreground, and by their hyperactivity
imposed a bisexuality of function upon a unisexual anatomic structure.
A man apparently as formidable as a tyrannosaurus, may be ruled by
his wife for the same reason. These combinations of a single organic
sexuality with a functional bisexuality, based upon internal secretion
disturbances, are frequent, and merit the name of functional
hermaphrodites or mixed sex types.
MIXED SEX AND THE FAMILY
The psychology of the family in its relation to the endocrine traits
of its members is something that still remains to be thoroughly worked
out as a problem of tremendous importance. Particularly are the
reactions of the mixed sex types to be carefully considered. For,
since the family is fundamentally a sex institution, devised to
satisfy the sex needs, all the way from companionship to parenthood,
it is apparent that the mixed sex types will be tried the hardest by
its inexorable conditions. It is in relation to the mother (or nurse)
first, the father next, and other associates in proportion to their
proximity, that the primary endocrine-vegetative mechanisms, the germs
of the growing soul, become established. These are superimposed upon
the hereditary instinct apparatus.
Fear, rage and love reactions develop first in association with the
suckling reflex, and the accompaniments, the mother's smile and voice,
the color of her hair, eyes and skin, her breasts and odors. Each time
the babe reacts to a pleasant or unpleasant stimulus, there is an
outpouring of certain internal secretions, a cessation of others, a
tingling of certain vegetative nerves and organs, a hushing of others.
The ensemble of reactions tends to be repeated around the same
stimulus, until the whole becomes automatic. One may observe the same
process in the lower animals. Offer a piece of meat to a dog and his
mouth waters. Ring a bell before offering the meat. Repeat this a
number of times, and after a while the mere ringing of the bell,
without the presence of the meat, will cause his mouth to water. This
associated vegetative secretion reflex is the most fundamental to
grasp in an understanding of the deepest strata of personality.
Now there are, besides the associated vegetative-endocrine reactions,
certain inborn automatic processes in the vegetative system and in
the internal secretion system, which work automatically to produce
increased intravisceral pressures. The reduction of these pressures
below the point of their intrusion upon consciousness, their relief,
as we say, also form the centers of constellations around feelings
of satisfaction or love. Such, for example, are the voiding of
excretions. Sooner or later, these automatic reactions, and the
associated reflexes formed around the mother, father and other
associates, come into conflict. Inhibitions or prohibitions of the
automatic act at certain times or moments are imposed by somebody.
And so there occurs a pitting of the automatic mechanism against the
associated reflex. Conflict with adjustment by suppression must occur.
Thus a sense of self as active wisher (for the automatically pleasant
experience), and punishable suppressor (of the same in favor of the
acquired associated reflex) develops.
So far, so good. Compromise by regulation from above, from the
brain, of the automatic reactions follows, as training. No absolute
repression is forced, no absolute encouragement is indorsed.
Harmonious equilibrium, or normality, continues. But now there come
upon the scene the unconscious fears.
In the paleontology of character, these fears are the deepest strata,
the eocene era, so to speak, of the soul. They are the hardest to get
at and the most silent, as well as the most dominant of the influences
which guide conduct. In Sir Walter Raleigh's words:
"Passions are best likened to streams and floods.
The shallows murmur, the deeps are dumb."
During the first period of childhood, up to five or six, the primary
fears group themselves around the taboos and secrets of its life.
Though we have every reason for believing that the sex glands are
acting in some way upon the organism during this time, nothing
definite is known. Yet, as the numerous studies of the subconscious
recently made prove, sex curiosity like the other curiosities,
flowers. More than about the automatic visceral reactions, these
curiosities evoke the repressive imperatives of the associates, the
mother and father especially. These repressive influences may be
and often are the effects of ignorance, prudishness, vulgarity, or
homosexuality, or the sex perversions that are known as sadism and
masochism. But by the necessities of the case, the sex wishes become
overlayed by reflexes associated with the mother and father and close
associates as love. This might be termed the oligocene. As the circle
of acquaintance widens, other loved objects usher in the miocene
phases of the development. With these become interspersed various
hates and detestations, deliberately cultivated and accepted by the
consciousness. So we have a cross-slice of the personality in the
first five or six years of childhood.
But now, with the onset of the second dentition, a subtle change
begins in the endocrine equations of the body. The second dentition
itself is an expression of a certain internal secretion wave passing
through the cells, an increase of action of some hormones, a decrease
of others. And a consciousness of physical sexuality appears, while
the outlines of character, hitherto mere tracings, become firmer,
heavier, quasi-indelible lines. That there is some activity on the
part of the internal secretions of the sex glands, the ovaries and
testes, can be demonstrated by accurately charting the behaviour of a
boy or girl after this time. It will be found that there is a cyclic
variation of health and conduct, more or less marked of course in each
case. A cold may appear periodically at the end of each month, an
increase of irritability and waywardness may be observed, or, on the
contrary, a decrease of the regular restless playfulness. The ghost of
sex begins to haunt the scene.
Now all kinds of possibilities of conflict emerge. The child is still
a bisexual, growing into a mixed sex type, depending upon the nature
and amount of its internal secretions. The influencing adult of the
family, the most important of the external factors encouraging or
depressing the tendencies of the child, possesses a fairly fixed ideal
of monosexuality which he or she, generally quite unconsciously, seeks
to impose upon it. A doting feminine mother will make her son as much
as possible like her husband: if she dislikes her husband, as much as
possible like her father or grandfather. A masculinized mother will
tend to make a sex object out of the son, however, which means his
feminization. But, on the internal secretion side, the boy may be
definitely masculine. That is, after adolescence he would be strongly
masculine, _if the vegetative-endocrine mechanisms created by the
mother's personality had not slipped into the inside track_, so to
speak. As a consequence, continual subconscious conflict between the
two sets of sex reaction will, sooner or later, disturb, perhaps
disrupt and ruin his life.
So an infant may start life with a fairly balanced endocrine
equipment, with its wake of a normal life (barring accidents and
infections), and yet he may end as an inferior, insane, criminal, or
failure directly because of establishment of conflict between himself
as one sort of sex type, and his obligatory associates of another
sort of mixed sex type. This applies also to the mother-daughter, the
father-son, and the father-daughter relationship.
Male and female created He them, is a bald misstatement of the facts.
Male and female emerge as final by-products of endocrine heredity,
environmental treatment and adaptation. Often the male-female,
the female-male, persist anatomically, or are forced to persist
functionally. Society, constructed upon the Biblical dogmas of man as
a fallen angel, and absolute sex, is responsible for much misery and
suffering meted out to the functional hermaphrodite, as we shall see
later in an analysis of the endocrine character of Oscar Wilde. The
privileges and powers of sex relationship, marriage and parenthood,
should be safeguarded for the mixed sex type, the man or woman with
the variable sex index. For there are no tragedies in life more
pitiful than those in which an aggressive masculinely built type is
forced to assume a submissive, receptive, passive, feminine role and
vice versa, the tragedy of compelled homosexuality, because of wrong
associates.
MASOCHISM AND SADISM
The functional hermaphrodite enables us, too, to understand the
phenomena of masochism and sadism, to a certain extent, on the
chemical side. The masculine personality, the combination of
masculine, e.g., adrenal cortex and gonad internal secretion
predominance, is built for aggression. The feminine personality,
the union of feminine, e.g. thyroid and ovarian superiority, is
constructed for submission. Reverse the possibilities, or confuse
them, as occurs in the functional hermaphrodite, and the attitudes
become reversed or perverted. So a masculinoid personality in woman
will make for sadism, a feminoid personality in a man for masochism.
Variants and refinements of these perversions will often be found
in the functional hermaphrodite who must satisfy two doubly flowing
streams of visceral pressure within himself. Persistence of the thymus
or pineal gland tends to a prolongation of the infantile and child
types, that will be taken advantage of.
CHAPTER VII
THE RHYTHMS OF SEX
If one permits a drop of ink to fall into a glass of water, amazing
figures and shapes, bizarre and chameleon, are born as the blue swirls
and whirls through the resisting medium. Unseen forces and currents,
tides and pressures, set up a seething and flowing, pulling and
twisting of the drop of ink until it becomes a strange wraith created
out of the molecules. A temporary individuality lives in the water.
So likewise the forces of sex, essentially the forces of the internal
secretions, mould and sculpt and mould again the woman out of
the flesh and blood. Adolescence--puberty--menstruation: the
maid,--pregnancy--labor--lactation: the matron, thirty years of ups
and downs of these processes around the idea of love or suppressed
love, against an aesthetic background of some sort--and finally the
loss of the stress and strain of sex, the menopause. All the landmarks
of the life of woman, in their entirety, are erected and dominated by
the tides and currents, the phases of concentration and dilution, of
the different internal secretions in the endocrine mixture which is
the blood.
Marvelous are all the manifestations of the reproductive necessity.
Considering that reproduction was at first merely a form of growth, a
discontinuous kind of growth, that seized upon sex as a splendid means
to escape death, the chemical methods evolved arouse a sense of awe.
A baby is born with her or his glands practically as fixed for her or
him as the color of the eyes. Thymus and pineal keep him a child, keep
him unsexed. Then at puberty, a new current is added to the calmly
flowing river, and behold! a turmoil. Ovaries or testes actively
functioning erupt upon the calm spectacle, and the girl is
transfigured into the maid, the boy into the youth. After the ovaries,
the corpus luteum: after the corpus luteum, the placenta: after the
placenta, the mammary glands: after that the cycle begins again until
the ovaries are exhausted and the chain is broken. Besides, all the
other glands of internal secretion beat in rhythm, fluctuate in their
activities, may divide prematurely the tides or dam them completely.
Innumerable varieties and combinations of interglandular action supply
us with the limitless types of adolescent girls. Some endocrine
cooperatives that make one girl stable and settled, will make others
unstable and unsettled. Alicia may be hyperthyroid, and so excitable,
nervous, restless, and subject to palpitation of heart and
sleeplessness. Bettina may have too much post-pituitary, and so will
menstruate early, tend to be short, blush easily, be sentimentally
suggestive and sexually accessible. Christina may be adrenal cortex
centred and so masculinoid: courageous, sporty, mannish in her tastes,
aggressive toward her companions. Dorothea may have a balanced thyroid
and pituitary and so lead the class as good-looking, studious, bright,
serene and mature. Florence, who has rather more thyroid than her
pituitary can balance, will be bright but flighty, gay but moody,
energetic, but not as persevering. And so on and so on.
Environment, habit-formation, training, education serve only to bring
out the internal secretion make-up of the girl, or to suppress
and distort and so spoil her. Adolescence will be peaceful, calm,
semi-conscious, or disturbing, revolutionary and obsessive according
to the reaction of the other endocrines to the rise of the ovaries.
Harmony, and so continued happiness of the mind and body, means
that they have been welcomed into the fold. Disharmony, ailments,
unhappiness, difficulties, mean that they are being treated as
intruders, or are acting as marauders. The after life, sexually the
period of maturity, barring accidents, diseases, and shocks, will bear
the same character. The kind of adolescence provides the clue to the
kind of maturity, for both are effects of the same endocrine factors.
THE SEX GLAND CHAIN
Furthermore, the activities of a normal woman involve a series of sex
glands. Since there function, in addition to the ovaries, the glands
of the uterus, the breasts or mammary glands, and the placental
gland (the secreting cells of the tissue which comes out as the
after-birth). Each of these contributes directly to the reproductive
life of the individual. To call the ova the sex glands is to confer
upon them a name which really belongs to a chain of glands.
All of the members of the sex chain, including those of the thyroid,
the adrenal and the pituitary, are necessary to the functions of
menstruation, impregnation, settlement of fertilized ovum in the wall
of the uterus, labor and lactation. A disturbance of one of them will
set up disturbances all along the line, and a resonance of distress
or compensation upon the part of all of them. As an interlocking
directorate over the sexual functions of the female, they are members
one of the other. So what helps or hurts one, helps or hurts all.
THE CYCLE OF MENSTRUATION
Essentially, the ovary is a collection of follicles, nests of
cells, acting as safe deposit vaults for the ova that are to become
candidates for fertilization. At birth, there are some 30,000 to
200,000 of these, of which a good many atrophy during childhood so
that there are no more than about 30,000 left at puberty. Of the
30,000, only an elite 400 actually mature between the ages of fifteen
and forty-five. About every twenty-eight days, one of the follicles
swells, becomes filled with liquid, pushes or is pushed to the surface
of the ovary, there to rupture and expel into the abdominal cavity the
tiny ripe ovum. The rest of the torn follicle makes itself over into
a peculiar yellowish body, the true corpus luteum, should pregnancy
occur. If pregnancy and the consequent placenta do not occur, it
shrinks and turns into a scar, the false corpus luteum. The true
corpus luteum resembles closely the adrenal cortex in make-up and
staining reactions. It seems as if, once successful impregnation has
been achieved, the feminine organism adrenalizes itself, makes itself
more masculine and less feminine, inhibiting the posterior pituitary
and the adrenal medulla, as well as the ovaries. Besides, the corpus
luteum stimulates the thyroid to prepare for the heavy demands to be
made upon it during pregnancy.
Before menstruation, there is a stage of preparation, a stir and
twittering of the endocrines, the premenstrual state. Currents of
communication flow between the different glands, messages and replies
pass to and fro. When these are properly balanced, so that all goes
well, the consciousness of the woman will be disturbed by no knowledge
of them. In some women abnormal sensations appear, a sense of fullness
in the breasts, or of weight in the back or pelvis, or pain in the
head. The last is probably due to swelling of the pituitary beyond
the capacity of its bony container. In a good many women, nervous
and mental phenomena herald the expected menstruation because of a
complete upset of the balance between the internal secretions, with
resulting disturbance of the nervous system. Irritability, depression,
excitability, melancholia, exaltations, restlessness, hysteria, loss
of self-control, or even more marked mental aberrations may appear.
Following them, and roughly paralleling them, may come various
abnormalities of menstruation itself. The character, extent and
duration of these furnish us the best clues to the endocrine stability
or instability of the particular feminine organism.
Menstruation is simply the uterus saying: well, not this time. As the
destined ovum within its nest, the follicle, grows, its fluid affects
the interstitial cells to send their specific stuff into the blood.
There it circulates, hits this gland and that, makes some more active,
others less, transforms the chemistry of the cells, and engorges the
mucous membranes, most of all those of the nose and of the uterus. It
is all to welcome the mature ovum and its possible impregnation, to
prepare a site for its landing and settlement, blood and food for its
nutrition, safety for its development. But it is not to be. No sperm
at hand, or effective enough to penetrate that wandering ovum. Love's
labour's lost. All must return to the so-called normal, really the
intermenstrual state. The womb must surrender some of that blood,
the glands return to their routine, and a sex diastole of the whole
organism succeeds. Until again, another follicle swells, another ovum
matures, and the premenstrual state of sex high tide cycles back.
Seven to ten days before menstruation we know that sex high tide is
beginning for that is when the blood pressure goes up. As this rise of
blood pressure is probably controlled by the posterior pituitary, we
have a clue to the reason for the rhythmic variations in the rate of
production of its secretion by the ovary. For, since menstruation is
so closely connected with the phases of the moon and the tides, the
rhythmicity of the posterior pituitary may be traced to the days when
the pineal was an eye at the top of the head, and in direct relation
with the pituitary.
Menstruation has been said to be a miniature labor. It is not that
as much as it is a miniature abortion. It is an effort of nature
still-born. But nature is quite used to its disappointments and
returns placidly to the daily grind. The four phases of a woman's
twenty-eight day cycle succeed each other as the premenstrual,
the menstrual, the postmenstrual and the intermenstrual, with the
precision of pistons moving in a motor, when no interfering factor
as disease, profound emotion or climate disturbances are present,
affecting the endocrines.
The sequence of events appears to be about as follows: The amount of
post-pituitary secretion reaches a certain concentration. This in turn
stimulates the thyroid and adrenal medulla. They in turn activate the
ovarian cells, which congest the uterine glands and lining membrane.
The follicle bursts, the ovum is discharged and wanders, the uterus
waits and wonders. Nothing happens, the curtain is lowered, the
scenery is removed, the actors revert to civilian clothes. That is the
story of menstruation, the central phenomenon of woman's pre-pregnancy
life. One sees it clearly as a play of an internal secretion
syndicate.
THE PREMENSTRUAL MOLIMINA
The premenstrual molimina is the traditional title accorded symptoms,
sensations, feelings, observations of women in the premenstrual phase.
In the light of endocrine analysis, they become exceedingly important
indicators of the underlying constitution of the individual concerned.
Indeed, the premenstrual period furnishes a direct clue to the
dominating internal secretion in a woman. Moreover, these premenstrual
phenomena are the shadows cast by coming events. For they mimic and
prophesy the events of the last crisis of feminine sex life,
the cessation of ovulation which goes by the name of menopause,
gonadopause, or change of sex life. The premenstrual phenomena provide
a positive film, so to speak, of the latent negative picture of the
endocrine system of the girl or woman.
Thus, there is the sub-pituitary or pituitary insufficient type, in
whom the excessive swelling of the gland causes headache, and a dull,
heavy, tired feeling, a definite depression. Drowsiness, sleepishness,
indifference to surroundings, general sluggishness of thought, feeling
and reaction, a phlegmatic frilosity, all go with it. It is due to
an overweighing of the pituitary, controller of good brain tone, and
alive wakefulness, by the demands of the organism.
On the other hand, the hyperthyroid type of woman reacts with an
exaggeration of her tendency. When the posterior pituitary begins to
secrete more in her its stimulation of the thyroid is enough to tip it
over the normal line. Such a woman in the premenstrual phase becomes
irritable and restless, does not know what to do with herself, cannot
concentrate on conversation, occupation or any single activity, may
become excited to the point of mania. Hot, tremulous, sleepless, or
sleeping badly, she has a much harder time of it than her pituitary
sister.
These samples of premenstrual internal secretion reaction are the
extremes of a vast number and variety of types. There are women in an
unstable quasi-premenstrual state for the greater part of their lives.
Sometimes an infectious disease or a psychic blow will put a woman
into this class. The significance of these cyclic changes has been
tremendously increased by the recent formal admission of women to
participation in public activities on a plane of equality with men.
Evidence exists that in man, too, there is some cyclic rhythmicity of
his endocrines, which sets up a fluctuation in his physical and mental
efficiency. The curves of these variations have still to be plotted,
and will doubtless contribute no little to our knowledge of the
control of human nature. One unexpurgated fact stands out: the
reproductive mechanism of woman has rendered her whole internal
secretion system, and so her nervous system, all her organs, her mind,
definitely and sharply more tidal in their currents, more zigzag in
their phases, more angular in their ups and downs of function, and so
less predictable, reliable and dependable.
THE MASCULINOID WOMAN
The masculinoid woman, as a functional hermaphrodite, exists first
as a congenital entity, with an inborn distribution of endocrine
predominances that make for masculinity. There are also numerous
acquired forms. The infections of childhood, measles, scarlet fever,
diphtheria, and above all mumps, may so damage the hormone system
that an inversion of sex type follows. However, the stimulative and
depressive effects of environment are even more significant. The
effects of environment in producing changes in an organism, the
changes the biologist sums up as adaptation, can be tracked in many
instances to responsive reactions of the glands of internal secretion
to demands made upon them by changed external conditions. So a cold
climate, which necessitates a more voluminous hair covering for an
animal, will evoke a hypertrophy of the adrenal cortex. Secondarily
other effects appear as by-products of the adaptation. The adrenal
cortex makes for pugnacity, temper, animal courage, irritability and
anger reactions. So a hairy animal will, in general (unless other
endocrines come in to defeat the primary effect), be more pugnacious,
courageous, irritable and combative. The same applies to woman. An
environment which tends to encourage the masculine traits in her, to
arouse repeatedly her pugnacity and combative decisions in the more
rapid give and take of the masculine world, will rouse the adrenal
cortex to greater activity, and so make her face hirsute, her
attitudes aggressive, and perhaps render her sterile. Concomitantly
there may be a disturbance of menstruation.
The presence or absence of sterility, natural or enforced, always
present, or say appearing after the birth of one child, must all be
donated a prominent place in studying the endocrine make-up of a
woman. When there is not enough ovarian secretion, the ovum may not be
able to burst through the ovary, a necessity before it may begin its
travels to the uterus. Next, the propulsive action of the genital
ducts may be insufficient because of defective corpus luteum. Or the
uterus may not have received enough posterior pituitary or thyroid to
make it fit soil for the ovum to plant itself in. Or there may be
too much of these, which cause the uterus to massage itself daily by
gentle contractions and so keep it well-toned. Excessive massage will
throw the ovum out. All these are factors in the sterility problem,
with its psychic resonances affecting the maternal instinct.
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
There have been created high odes to an unknown god, sensuous lyrics
of love, apostrophes and addresses to every human passion. But no
poet, to my knowledge, has risen to the heights of the maternal
instinct. Some contemporary clap-trap about sentimentalism will
perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for an apotheosis of it. There
are some who deny its existence, and assert that maternity is forced
upon every woman. Reduced to its elements, such nonsense turns out the
absurd pose of the theorist desperate to epater le bourgeois or to
cover up hidden defects in his or her make-up.
Without the maternal instinct, without the hope of immortality through
somatic or spiritual posterity, we should all, who were sane enough,
have to condemn ourselves to the futilities of hedonism. So that the
criminal who was condemned to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to
see it roll down again, would have to thank his lucky stars for his
lighter punishment. The future, tomorrow, the Kingdom of Heaven on
Earth, or if you will, the Republic of Supermen, means to all of us
what the child means to the madonna. The cynical epicurean careerists
and careeristinas, and the depraved degenerates of a comfort-lusting
civilization may have suffered an absolute atrophy and castration of
that instinct. But they are pathologic specimens, and we are not for
the moment concerned with them.
The Freudians have set up a great hullaballoo about creative
activities as sublimations of the sex instinct, or as they would have
it, the libido. That is their obsession, the confusion of the sex
instinct, the instinct for sex life and satisfaction in the relation
of the male to the female, with the maternal instinct. The paternal
instinct bears the same relation to the maternal, as the breasts of
the male do to those of the female, i.e., a functional hermaphrodite
trait. The maternal instinct is the instinct to create, provide and
care for offspring.
The mother expresses the deep craving of protoplasm for immortality.
What drives her is the instinct of Life to preserve itself unto
eternity in infinite space and time. That separates it sharply from
the temporary needs of the sex instinct. The artist, the man of
science or letters, the statesman, craftsman and maker of every
sort is instigated by the maternal instinct. He creates for his own
pleasure, to be sure. But it is in its essence the pleasure of the
bird making its nest.
It is necessary, therefore, to distinguish between the sex instinct
and the maternal instinct. For different glands of internal secretion
have been found responsible for them. A distinct difference in the
quality and amount of the two instincts may be observed in the same
person. A strong maternal instinct may be seen again and again to
dominate a woman with but little or no sex urge or passion. Numerous
physiologically frigid women have lived successful and happy married
lives because of contented maternity. Other women, with normal or
exaggerated sex instinct who welcome and stimulate the sex life, may
have no wish for children, no functioning maternal instinct at all,
and if sterile, will accept their fate with indifference or even
exultation. These variations occur because of a difference in chemical
source and determination of the two instincts. While the ovary,
stimulated by the thyroid and the adrenal medulla, is the chief
determinant of the sex instinct, to the posterior pituitary must be
credited the chief hormone of the maternal instinct. The interactions
of the two glands, the ovary and the posterior pituitary, modified
by accessory influences, determine the relative intensity of the two
instincts. In a sense, the two glands may be said to be antagonistic
and yet one stimulates and complements the other.
THE TRANSFIGURATIONS OF CHILD-BEARING
Though what happens at puberty, what happens all through life through
the agencies of the endocrines is amazing enough, what occurs during
the period of child-bearing is perhaps the most amazing of all. As
emphasized, pregnancy is the time, among the internal secretions, of a
great uprooting and stirring, of fundamental and cataclysmic changes
in the most intimate chemistry of the cells. It is as if a dictator,
inspired by his country's danger, its enemies at the gates of its
capitol, were to draft and mobilize everyone, man woman and child from
everyday activities to the necessities of defense. Or rather it is
as if there appeared within the heart of our civilization a common
purpose and intelligence, now so palpably lacking, which magnetized
and drew to itself all the streams of individual self-aggrandizing
effort. Imagine that possibility and how it would change the face of
the earth and the entire basic constitution of human life and society.
So do the profound tides of the hormones, centering around the new
creature being made in the womb, transfigure the face and constitution
of the child-bearing woman.
During pregnancy, in consequence, the integrity of every structure
of the body is tested. A stern, relentless accountant goes over the
cells, counts up their reserves, establishes a balance, credits and
debits according to the demands of the growing parasite within them.
Follow changes in the skin, the bones, the nervous system and the
mind. That is, all the glands, subtle recorders, transmitters,
producers of the vibrations of change are influenced. But the most
influential are the most affected, as the most dominant personalities
in a community are most disturbed by a revolution.
In Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street," the best novel ever made about
America as a nation of villagers, the heroine, Carol Kennicott, has
this to say to someone sentimentalizing about maternity.
"I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogar. My complexion is rotten, and my
hair is coming out, and I look like a potato bag, and I think my
arches are falling,... and the whole business is a confounded nuisance
of a biological process."
The exploration of the internal secretions has brought us an
explanation and an understanding of why child-bearing is a nuisance.
We know now that if Carol Kennicott's complexion became rotten and
her hair fell out, it was because her thyroid was not adequate to the
demands of pregnancy, and that if her arches were falling, and her
figure acquiring a potato bag dumpiness, it was because her pituitary
was insufficient. In all probability she was a thymus-centered type,
which accounts for much of the material that goes to make up the
novel.
Different endocrine types react characteristically toward the
situations of pregnancy. The adrenal type may not be able to respond
with the necessary enlargement of its cortex which is normal for the
needs of gestation. So pigmentations, darkenings and discolorations of
the skin, especially of the face, the traditional chloasma develops.
The hyperthyroid type may become sharply exaggerated, almost to the
point of mania and psychosis. The subthyroid will suffer an emphasis
of her defect, and pass on, because of pregnancy, to the truly
diseased state of myxedema, the state of dull, slow, stupid,
semi-animal semi-idiocy. The pituitary type becomes more masculinized.
The face becomes more triangular and coarser, the chin and cheek-bones
more pronounced, and there is a growth of all the bones, so that she
is seen to grow visibly in height and breadth, and in the size of the
hands and feet. Concomitantly, there is a changed, a more matured and
steadier outlook upon life, all due to stimulation of the anterior
pituitary, controller of growth, physical and mental.
In general, the major endocrines, the pituitary, the adrenals, and the
thyroid should hypertrophy and hyperfunction during pregnancy.
Should they not, should adverse mechanical circumstances or chemical
malfunction prevent, dire effects may follow. A woman with the
closed-in type of pituitary, shut up in a small non-expansile sella
turcica, will suffer the most violent headaches, will become fat, will
frequently abort. One whose thyroid cannot rise to the demands of
gestation, because of previous disease (like typhoid or measles) which
injured her thyroid excessively, may be poisoned by the new elements
introduced into the blood by the growing fetus, as it is the job
par excellence of the thyroid to render innocuous these poisons.
Of adrenal insufficiency, failure of the adrenals to hypertrophy
sufficiently in pregnancy, little is known. Possibly the corpus
luteum, the endocrine formed of the torn egg nest in the ovary, makes
up for any deficiency in this respect. For there is the most curious
resemblance imaginable between the cells of the adrenal cortex and
those of the corpus luteum, some day to be completely explained.
THE PLACENTAL GLAND
The placenta, an organ and gland of internal secretion newly formed in
the uterus, when the fertilized ovum successfully imbeds itself within
it, must be considered in any analysis of the transfigurations of
child-bearing. Born with the pregnancy, its life is terminated with
the pregnancy, for it is expelled in labor as the after-birth. Its
importance and function as a gland of internal secretion has become
known only recently. Many still doubt and question the accordance of
that rank to it. But feeding experiments with it, in various endocrine
disturbances in human beings, have proved its right to the title.
The placenta is created by the fusion of the topmost enlarged cells
of the uterine surface and the most advanced cells constituting
the vanguard of the growing and multiplying ovum. These front line
invaders interact with the cells in contact with them to make a new
organ which serves as lung, stomach and kidney for the embryo, since
it is the medium of exchange of oxygen, foodstuffs and waste products
between the blood of the mother and the blood of the embryo.
Ultimately it acts, too, as a gland of internal secretion, influencing
the internal secretions of the mother, and also those of the embryo.
Settlement of the fertilized ovum in the womb introduces into the
system new secretions, new substances which are partly male in origin,
since the ovum contains within it the substance of the male sperm
which has penetrated it. This masculine element causes a rearrangement
of the balance of power between the endocrines towards the side of
masculinity. They push down the pan of the scale to inhibit the
post-pituitary. So menstruation, the menstrual wave which follows the
increasing tide of post-pituitary secretion, is postponed. For ten
lunar months, not another ovum breaks through the covering of the
ovary, and the uterus is left undisturbed. The placental secretion
plays a most important role as brake upon the post-pituitary, the most
active of the feminizing uterus-disturbing endocrines. Until at last
something happens that puts the placenta out of commission in this
function of restraint, and the long bottled up post-pituitary
secretion explodes the crisis apparent as the process of labor.
A condition of self-poisoning often occurs in pregnancy, with symptoms
orchestrating from mild notes like nausea and vomiting to the high
keys of convulsions and insanities. They represent what happens when
an unbalanced endocrine system is attacked by the placenta. Depending
upon where in the internal secretion chain the weak point, the
Achilles' heel spot, will be found, the nature of the reaction will
vary. And even after labor, after the explosive crisis, so much of the
reserve endocrine materials may be consumed, that an actual mania or a
chronic weakness may come in its wake.
Yet the placental secretion must not be looked upon as something
wholly evil in its potentialities. Without enough of it to hold the
uterus stimulating endocrines, particularly the post-pituitary, in
check, still-birth results. If there is enough, and not too much of
it, the woman will not feel ill at all, or perhaps only transiently,
but will be possessed of a curious feeling of drowsy content and
passive, relaxed happiness. Let there be relatively too much of it,
too little of the other glands, and the grosser transfigurations and
ailments of the child-bearing period follow.
THE MAMMARY GLANDS
Once pregnancy is terminated by labor, the placenta is expelled from
the body as the after-birth. The placenta removed, a new arrangement
of the balance of power among the endocrines becomes necessary. But a
new-comer appears upon the scene to take up the function left vacant
by the absent placenta. This new-comer is the secretion of the
activated breasts, the mammary glands. They make for a persistence
of the state of equilibrium among the endocrines attained during
pregnancy.
The mammary glands are typical glands of external secretion. They make
the milk and pour it out of the breasts through little canals into the
mouth of the suckling. Yet evidence forces us to conclude that they
are also glands of internal secretion, that their internal secretion
substitutes to a certain extent for the loss of that of the placenta
but not quite.
What seems to happen in fact, is this: the corpus luteum secretion
stimulates the dormant cells of the mammary glands, formed during
puberty, but latent until the advent of pregnancy. We know that
injection of corpus luteum will cause an hypertrophy of the breasts.
The same effect is produced regularly during the menstrual period,
with a consciousness of swelling of the breasts. Their atrophy at the
menopause coincides with the shrinkage of the ovaries that takes place
at that period. Activity of the breasts parallels indeed more or less
the activity of the corpus luteum.
With the prolonged activity of the corpus luteum during pregnancy,
prolonged stimulation of the breasts occurs. The secretion of the
post-pituitary would now cause the change from the internal cell
secretion to milk. But it is inhibited from so doing by the placenta.
When the placenta is removed, after labor, the post-pituitary can act,
and a free flow of milk is established. However, to counterbalance
this, and to prevent the post-pituitary from overacting, the breasts
secrete a hormone with an action like that of placenta, but not so
strong, which tends to inhibit the ovary. So is put off the imposition
of a pregnancy upon a period of lactation, obviously bad for mother,
infant, and embryo. We have here an exquisite sample of the checks and
compensations which make for a self-balancing of the whole endocrine
system.
CRITICAL AGES
The Dangerous Age is a phrase coined by a Scandinavian writer as a
more dramatic euphemism for the time of life when sex function ceases,
the climacteric. As a matter of fact, the age of adolescence is just
as much of a dangerous age as the age of deliquescence. The only
difference between them is that the dangers of the one have been
hushed up, the dangers of the other well boomed and advertised.
Both are dangerous to the individual, because both are periods of
instability and readjustment of the cells, particularly the brain
cells, to a deranged endocrine system and blood chemistry.
Moral attitudes differ at the two ages, not so much as an effect of
experience, as expressions of different visceral pressures produced
by newly dominant internal secretions. So in Eugene O'Neil's play,
"Diff'rent," we see the woman Emma Crosby as she is in her youth, when
her ovaries have budded and bloomed for only a few years, and her
other endocrine influences are still dormant. She breaks off her
engagement to Captain Caleb Williams on the eve of her wedding because
she is informed of the episodes of a sex affair he was involved in on
his last voyage, under circumstances not discreditable to him. The
next act shows her thirty years later when, as an elderly spinster,
she is passing through the climacteric, and is in the state of sexual
hyperesthesia some women are afflicted with before the menopause. It
is as if the ovaries and the accessory sex internal secretions erupt
into a sort of final geyser before they are exhausted. So the captain,
ever faithful, finds her, and discovers to his horror that she is a
thousand times more like other women than he has ever been like other
men. Because of his ignorance of the underlying chemical basis for
the transfiguration, tragedy follows. Critics may cackle about a sex
starved woman, who has repressed her natural desires, and hail the
play as a contribution to the Freudian clinics. As a matter of fact,
it is a study of libido variation, with endocrine variation, at two
stages of the inner chemical life of a woman.
The chain of events at the menopause, the acme and then ebb of the sex
tide, may be summed up something like this:
The ovaries cease producing their eggs and so shrivel as a storage
battery atrophies when it dries up. An important member of the
endocrine board of directors thus drops out, and so a rearrangement
of gland activities, a new regime, becomes necessary. If a balance
of power is established quickly and equitably, very little happens.
Quickly the woman passes on to the next plane of her existence. But
if some endocrine proves recalcitrant, and takes advantage of the
situation to make itself dominant, trouble and maladjustment, and
their psychic echoes, come. Anterior pituitary control will mean
a relative masculinization, with hair on the face and aggressive
attitudes. Post-pituitary most often refuses to settle down, and
expressing its ambition as headaches, flushes, obesity and hysteria,
may cause extreme misery and unhappiness to its possessor. Sooner
or later, if the harmonious equilibrium of the normal life is to be
revived, all the glands must regress, thyroid, pituitary and adrenals.
With the waning of the ovarian function, the thyroid type will also
exhibit its particular flare. If there is thyroid excess the woman
will be excitable and irritable, the thyroid deficient will be
depressed and dull, the thyroid unstable (that is swinging between
excess and deficiency) will have a cyclic up and down alternation of
mood and temperament. The adrenal centered will have a high blood
pressure and masculinoid traits, the adrenal inferior will have a low
blood pressure and suffer from a constant weakness and fatigability.
So each form of reaction to the critical ages is individualized
according to the predominating glandular influence in the constitution
of the woman. When the womb has atrophied, and the breasts have
shrunk, the typical tan complexion, and the angular masculinoid
figure, face and psyche follow, and the transfiguration has been
completed.
Man has his critical age of sex cell deterioration as well as woman.
The age period swings between forty-five and fifty-five. Here enters
upon the scene that organ of external and internal secretion, the
prostate, the most important of the accessory sex glands in the male.
Experiments with its extract upon growing tadpoles have demonstrated
it to have the same differentiating effects as thyroid, but without
the poisoning effects. Furthermore, the microscope reveals cyclic
changes in its cells comparable to the menstrual phenomena of the
uterus. Indeed it is accepted as the homologue or male representative
of the uterus. Small and undeveloped during childhood, its growth at
puberty parallels that of the other reproductive organs. Its secretion
has been shown to be necessary to the vitality of the sperm cells.
The regression of the prostate, its retirement from the field of
sex competition, is the central episode of the male climacteric.
Accompanying its shrinking are prominent an irritable weakness,
despondency, and melancholia, which may emerge at any time if there is
disease or disturbance of it. The influence of the prostate upon man's
mental condition, and its contribution to the sex index, still remains
to be investigated in detail.
SEX CRISES
At the periods of interstitial cell hyperactivity, when a wave
of radicalism in the blood sweeps through the tissues, the other
endocrines are tested, and their latent stability or instability is
made manifest. Even before puberty, cyclic variations of health and
conduct may be observed in boys and girls which undoubtedly depend
upon currents among the internal secretions. Children, who, in the
best of circumstances, habitually are attacked by a wanderlust and run
away from home, or suffer from fits of naughtiness, are samples of
such endocrine lability. Children specialists have found that at about
the end of the second year their charges begin to individuate. In a
certain percentage, sex traits appear pretty early. But the fact
of the matter is that it is rather the minority of girls who
spontaneously exhibit the traditional stigmata of the natural girl.
The doll-cherishing, housekeeping imitator of mother is another story.
At puberty arise the most exquisite cases of life crisis dependent
upon hormonic crisis. The boy becomes restless, irritable and
quick-tempered when his thyroid and adrenals respond to the call of
the interstitial cells. If they do not, he will become dull, heavy,
lazy and listless. The girl correspondingly is transformed into a
vivacious, gay, nervous and apprehensive butterfly, or a sedate,
dreamy, bashful, or even morose moth. It is interesting to note that
poise, mental equilibrium, is not established until physical growth
ceases, marked by a cessation of growth of the long bones known as
ossification of the epiphyses. Poise seems to be controlled by the
ante-pituitary. The growth of the long bones is also dominated by the
ante-pituitary. It would seem as if, its secretion dedicated to the
one function, could not be available for the other. So it happens that
those in whom growth ceases early (probably because of an earlier
and more vigorous invasion of the internal secretion system by the
interstitial cell product), develop mental maturity more rapidly and
possess more of it than those in whom growth continues. The acumen and
salacity of certain dwarfs is proverbial. The puberty phenomena
teach that sex crises of every sort are dependent fundamentally upon
fluctuations, periodic or aperiodic, of the sex index, as we have
defined it.
THE DETERMINING FACTORS OF SEX LIFE
The material summarized in the preceding paragraphs furnish some
slight inkling of the vast dominion of Sex, in all its relations,
somatic and spiritual, over which the glands of internal secretions
rule. The founder of modern pathology, Virchow, said that woman is
woman because of her ovaries. He meant that woman is a woman, the sort
of woman she specifically is, because of her internal secretions. But
no divine decree has laid down a line of cleavage between man and
woman. There are fundamental constitutional differences between man
and woman. But it is just as true that man is man because of _his_
internal secretions.
We have seen that the concepts of Man and Woman are the end-points of
a curve including variations of every possible combination that are
embraced in the construction of a sex index. This sex index is not an
absolute constant, although its range of fluctuation is pretty well
fixed at birth. It varies from day to day, year to year, depending
upon the influences that have been brought to bear upon it. But it
determines the character of the three planes of sex: the endocrine,
the vegetative, and the psychic. The endocrine is concerned with the
fundamental chemistry of sex, the internal secretions, which determine
the chemical reactions that provide the free energy for the sex
process. Upon the vegetative plane occur those transformations,
tensions, and relaxations, in the viscera, which are controlled
in part by the endocrines and in part by the experiences of the
individual as registered in his subconscious. Upon the psychic,
conscious planes appear the echoes and reflections of the occurrences
upon the other two planes, as well as reactions arising in the brain
from the necessity of the organism reacting as a whole to isolated
episodes. Accompanying is a self-awareness of the organism as a unit.
The three planes are not like separate plates of glass one raised
above the other, the usual idea picture of planes. They are
nebulae, swirling into each other, influencing and being influenced
continually. The reactions among these three complexes of sex create
the milieu for the variations and aberrations of tendency, character
and conduct which stamp his unique quality upon the individual. Sex
morale is likewise so influenced. The fundamentals of sex ethics will,
in due time, be revised in accordance with these conceptions.
CHAPTER VIII
HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND
It is impossible to review here in detail all the facts accumulated
concerning the influence of the internal secretions upon all the
processes of mind, intellectual and emotional. A volume would not
suffice for their adequate consideration. Reflexes, instincts,
habits, tendencies and emotions are involved in their machinery. The
development and normal functioning of the intellect, the pure reason
as Kant called it, are controlled by them. Brain, without them in
solution, without enough of them in that wonderful solution, the
blood, sleeps or remains dormant like the butterfly in the cocoon.
The cretin, who has not enough thyroid or no thyroid, is an imbecile
because of his deficiency. Supply him with thyroid from outside
sources, feed him animal thyroid, be it of the sheep, the pig, or the
goat, and behold a miracle! he is restored to the level of at least
the relatively normal intelligence.
Acuteness of perception, memory, logical thought, imagination,
conception, emotional expression or inhibition and the entire content
of consciousness are influenced by the internal secretions. The most
ultramicroscopic activities of the molecules and atoms in the highest
nerve cells and nerve tissues are dominated. The speed of their
chemistry and their associations, and thus the speed of thought, are
regulated. Iodine has been shown to increase the electric conductivity
of the brain that is, the rate at which electrons will fly through it.
The thyroid may then be regarded as manipulating the amount of iodine
brought to play upon the brain cells at a particular moment of danger
or exaltation. Adrenalin increases the electric conductivity of the
brain. Nerve impulses, and with them sensations and ideas, travel
faster or flow more quickly through iodinized or adrenalinized brain
cells. In dangerous situations we think more rapidly and keenly, for
in emergencies the blood floods the brain with extra thyroid and
adrenal secretions.
THE BODY-MIND COMPLEX
Mind, still regarded by most of mankind as something distinct and
apart from the body, is thus exhibited as but part and parcel of it. A
deaf, dumb, and blind animal, deprived of tongue, and olfactory mucous
membrane, without sensations from the outside world can grow no mind,
in the sense of intelligence. The sense organs of the body mediate
the primary mind stuff. Without internal secretions and a vegetative
system there could be no soul, in the sense of complex emotion. Nor
those combinations of thought and emotion which synthesize attitudes,
sentiments and character. The internal secretions and the vegetative
system mediate the primary soul stuff. Mind is thus emulsified with
body as a matter of cold literal fact. The soul was once a subtlety
of metaphysics. Now when mind appears soaked in matter saturated with
chemicals like the hormones, therefore woven out of material threads,
the independent entity created out of intangible spirit flies like a
ghost at dawn.
View the outlook. Mind, the slippery phantom, now becomes controllable
for the purposes of everyday life, because we can put our fingers
upon, touch, handle and change these material factors, the internal
secretions and the vegetative system. Through them we may affect the
very quality of the nerve tissue. The future of the race, the future
of human nature, depends upon the knowledge to be born of the
researches into the vast possibilities of this idea. Man, the
Adventurer, the prey of Chance and Luck, will then become, indeed now
becomes, the Captain of Fate and Destiny.
It is, of itself, a revolution in the intellect, to conceive of
instincts and emotions, suggestibility and contra-suggestibility,
initiative and imitation, volitions and inhibitions as chemical
matters. In all their relations, mutually reacting effects and
defects, excesses and deficiencies, the internal secretions set up
psychic echoes and reflections. When morbid and their equilibrium
dislocated, we may even have phobias and neuroses.
A man's nature is essentially his endocrine nature. Primarily, when he
is born, he represents a particular inherited combination of different
glands of internal secretion. They, constituting the inventory of his
vital stock in trade, start him in life. Afterwards, food, the routine
of his existence, the accidents of experience, education, disease and
misfortune, in short, environment, modify him because they modify his
ductless glands and his vegetative apparatus, as well as his brain,
depressing some parts, and stimulating others, and so rearranging the
system. In particular will he be transformed as the gland is affected
which is the centre of the system to which the others adapt and
accommodate themselves. The inertia of the system is very great,
almost absolute, and always tends to return. If he has children, he
hands on his constellation of endocrines, in spite of mishaps, not at
all or only slightly transformed. Sometimes, however, the experiential
transformation has been sufficiently deep, and shaken the very
constitution of his germ-plasm. So family dispositions and traits,
national and racial temperaments, are propagated, maintained and
varied.
THE SEX INSTINCTS
Hormone reactions, as we have seen, initiate the complicated forces,
processes and expressions of sex. The dictum of the founder of modern
pathology, Virchow, that Woman was in effect an appendix to the
ovaries, has long been taken to apply to her psychic traits as well
as somatic. Her mind, like her skin, her hair and her pelvis, is a
product of the ovarian endocrines. But these determinations are by no
means her monopoly. Man is likewise a creation of the chemical wheels
within wheels and springs within springs that are his glands of
internal secretion. That he is not so obviously an appendix to his
testes is due to two reasons. First, the male sex hormones have not
the instability nor cyclic rhythmicity of the female. Secondly, and
perhaps consequently, his sex instincts have become overlayered with
other more labile instincts, with habits and customs and necessities
that appear to oust the sex instinct into an altogether decentralized
position. Moreover, it is the function of the female to be the excitor
in the sex process: her subconscious, thoroughly aware of the fact,
sees to it that the sex instinct stands starkly central and dominating
in her life.
The moods of love, like the more stereotyped manifestations of sex,
are dependent upon a proper supply to the blood of the internal
secretions of the reproductive organs, the gonadal endocrines. If the
testes are removed from frogs, it is found that the clasp-reflex,
symptom of sex desire, is abolished. If, after an interval of several
days, the testes' extract is injected into the frog, the reflex
reappears for a few days. The hormone provoking this sex reflex is
present in the testes only during the breeding season. In birds,
the seasonal nesting and migrating instincts may be eliminated by
interfering with their ovaries. At the same tine there is a change in
their plumage toward the male type. Similarly, the males, when their
sex endocrines are cut off, will change their psychic nature as well
as physically. Besides owning his flag-waving comb, his spurs and
brighter feathers, the rooster struts to attract the female, and
fights aggressively with his sex competitors. When he is made a capon,
he loses his spurs and comb and distinctive plumage, and in addition
becomes retiring and submissive, in short, a pseudo-hen in his
instincts as well as in appearance. If the genital glands are
extirpated from a male before puberty, the wattles remain small, pale
and bloodless, no active, amorous or combative instinct emerges. The
creature maintains a demure silence, and may even be sought by a
virile male. So we may see homosexuality of a kind in the lowest
animals. On the other hand, hens deprived of ovaries tend to
metamorphose in the male direction, even to acquire the male spurs,
and to display the male attitudes.
All through the animal world, in the springtime, when the pituitary
awakens or increases its secretion, and so stimulates the sex glands
to augmented activity, emotions of sex and their expression are
provoked by the inner stirring. When the nightingale warbles
passionately and the mocking bird gurgles provokingly, when the robin
fills its scarlet breast and the starling floats in ecstasy through
the perfumed air, when the pigeon coyly woos its mate, and the
butterfly flirts with the dazzling multicolors of its wings, when
all the marvelous devices of sex attraction in nature, selection and
courting, mating and reproducing are pondered, who but must wonder at
the infinite possibilities of reaction of the sex hormones? All is for
love, and all is because of the love in the blood that is manufactured
unconsciously by a few hidden cells.
EXPRESSIONISM AND EXHIBITIONISM
We need a detailed examination of the various forms of expression
art has differentiated into, in its relation to exhibitionism and as
effects of the circulating libido-producing substance of the gonads.
Sex exhibition differs in man and woman because of the differently
combined internal secretions that are their substrates. The male's
attitude, aggressive pursuit, is instigated by the compound adrenal
and gonad endocrines. The female's various emulsions of coyness and
display are motivated by posterior pituitary and gonad hormones in
alliance.
It is a dogma to state that the internal secretions of sex do not
begin to function until after puberty. Some children manifest
exhibitionism with a certain independence of environment.
Before adolescence a good many girls act like tom-boys, and are
distinguishable externally from boys only by their clothes. But others
display signs of sex differentiation that are to be traced back to
an awakening interstitial gonad action. Some boys have no interest
whatever in sex. Others will show an intense curiosity spontaneously,
a curiosity which perhaps may be explained as a larval precocity,
dependent upon the minimum of sex hormone production by the gonads.
Close observation of the correlation of somatic and psychic
development in extreme examples of these children corroborates this
view. Jonathan Hutchinson has described full-busted children of
London already boasting of their affairs. Indeed, as education and
environment affect the body (in so far as they influence it as a
whole) by exciting or inhibiting the glands of internal secretion,
sex-arousing stimuli from without must be considered to evoke their
effects as stimulants of the latent puberty glands.
At puberty, when the sex glands bloom, and the complex of the sex
instincts is activated, exhibitionism manifests itself in a host of
guises and disguises. Femininity in a woman, the womanly woman, or the
eternal feminine, may indeed be defined by the degree of somatic and
psychic exhibitionism she presents. A woman who has a delicate skin,
lovely complexion, well-formed breasts and menstruates freely will be
found to have the typical feminine outlook on life, aspirations
and reactions to stimuli, which, in spite of the protests of our
feminists, do constitute the biologic feminine mind. Large, vascular,
balanced ovaries are the well-springs of her life and personality.
On the other hand, the woman who menstruates poorly or not at all
is coarse-featured, flat-breasted, heavily built, angular in her
outlines, will also be often aggressive, dominating, even enterprising
and pioneering, in short, masculinoid. She is what she is because she
possesses small, shrivelled, poorly functioning ovaries. Between these
two types all sorts of transitions exist, according as the other
endocrines participate in the constitutional make-up. But no better
examples could be given, off-hand, of the determining stamp of the
internal secretions upon mind, character and conduct.
INSTINCT AND BEHAVIOUR
The sex instinct, analyzed as an endocrine mechanism, provides the
clue to the understanding of all instinct and behaviour. If the
post-pituitary regulates the maternal instinct, then its correlates:
sympathy, social impulses, and religious feeling, must be also
influenced, and so is furnished another example of a chemical control
of instinctive behaviour. McDougall, once of Oxford, now of Harvard,
introduced into psychology the idea of the simple instinct as a unit
of behaviour, regarding the most complex conduct as a compounding of
instincts. The instinct itself he analyzed into three elements: a
specific stimulus-sensation, an emotion following, all ending in a
particular course of muscular reaction. Translated into endocrine
terms, what happens may be pictured as a series of chemical events.
When the activity of a ductless gland rises above a certain minimum,
its hormones in the blood sensitize, as a photographic plate is
sensitized, a group of brain cells, to respond to a message from
the outside world, with a definite line of conduct. There is a
registration by the brain cells of the presence of the specific
stimulus. Then there is communication by them with the endocrine
organs. As a result, some of them are moved to further secretion,
and others are paralyzed or weakened. In consequence of changes
of concentration in the blood of the various internal secretions,
tensions, movements and tumescences, as well as relaxations,
inhibitions and detumescences, occur throughout the vegetative
system--the blood vessels, the viscera, the nerves and the muscles.
Each wires to the brain news of the change in it. In addition, the
brain cells themselves are excited or depressed by the new hormones
bathing them. In their final fusion, the commingling vegetative
sensations constitute the emotion evolved in the functioning of the
instinct.
To lower the new tensions throughout the vegetative system to
the normal range, the instinctive action is carried out. This
superficially is regarded as the essence of the instinct. As a matter
of fact, it is only the endpoint of a process, the resultant of a
drive to restore equilibrium within the organism. It may all happen in
less time than it takes to tell about it.
The play of an instinct may therefore be analyzed into four processes.
They succeed one another as sensation--endocrine stimulation--tension
within the vegetative system--conduct to relieve tension. The dash is
the symbol of a cause and effect relationship.
This equation for an instinct, based upon an analysis of the working
of the sex instinct, is the model for the analysis of all instincts,
and therefore of all the compounded instincts that all human behaviour
may be resolved into. Conduct, that fascinator of the common gossip
and the great novelist alike, normal and abnormal, social and asocial,
in all their complexities, even unto the third and fourth generation,
the Freudian complexes, is governed therefore by the same laws that
determine the movements of the stars and the eruptions of volcanoes.
The most interesting factor in the instinct equation is the endocrine,
because that is the one that is most purely chemical.
ENDOCRINE CHARGING OF WISHES
It is _the_ distinction of modern psychology that it has established
the wish (craving, need, desire, libido) as the moving force in any
psychic process. The position of the wish in psychology as the force
within and behind the instinct may be compared to that of energy in
physics, when it was elevated to a central position in the explanation
of physical processes in the nineteenth century. The concept of the
_charged_ wish has illuminated all the hidden recesses and rendered
audible all the subdued murmurings of the mind. The truly novel in the
content of the idea is the recognition of the fact that the wish is
charged. Now it could never be charged in a vacuum. That means that
a wish could never be born in the brain alone. For the brain has no
power to charge itself with energy--it can only store and transmit. If
a wish is potential energy that must be transformed into kinetic, it
must have a source. That source is the vegetative system. Without the
vegetative system, the great complex of viscera in the abdomen and
chest, blood and its vessels, endocrines, muscles and nerves, the
brain would remain but an intricate cold storage plant of memories,
associations of past experiences. It would need no change and initiate
no effort. But when the wish enters upon the scene, it is as if a dead
storage battery has been refreshed with new current. Enriched with
billions of electrons there is a stir and a movement, dynamic mind.
But the dynamo is the more ancient possession of the animal, the
vegetative apparatus. In short, what must always be remembered is that
a wish is never cerebral, but always sub-cerebral, visceral, in its
origins.
The sub-cerebral makes the cerebral. Activities in the nervous system
below the brain and especially the vegetative system, force upon it
its function of the active verb. It has to be, to do, and to suffer,
and then to manipulate the environment to satiate the insatiable
viscera, insatiable because the local chemistry is continually raising
the tension of one or the other of them. A physics of human behaviour
becomes possible with the aid of these concepts of endocrine
regulation of intravisceral pressure, and intervisceral equilibrium,
an intramuscular pressure and an intermuscular equilibrium, with the
brain as the shifting fulcrum of the system.
The sensation of hunger, as we have seen, serves as good an exemplar
as any of this mechanism of the wish. Hunger is preceded and
accompanied by contractions of the stomach of increasing intensity.
Those contractions must be brought about by a substance acting upon
the nerve endings in the wall of the stomach. As it closes down upon
itself, waves pass up and down. With each wave, the pressure within it
rises. The exact amount of the pressure may be accurately measured
by means of a small balloon swallowed and then inflated. When the
pressure rises above a certain figure, the sensation of hunger breaks
into the consciousness of the individual. We infer that certain
sensory impulses sent up to the brain attain a strength that finally
forces itself into the conscious field of feeling. The sensation of
hunger varies from individual to individual because of variation in
the reaction throughout the vegetative system. Most often it is a
sense of movement or even an itch in the upper abdomen. Let some cause
produce a weakening or cessation of the movements of the stomach--as
fear and anger--and the sensation of hunger disappears coincidently
with the drop in the pressure within it. As the mathematicians
would say, the wish is a function of the pressure, and so of the
concentration of substance behind the pressure.
We have in hunger the wish reduced to the lowest terms, the most
primitive form of it. Yet we may resolve all wishes, even the most
idealistic, into the same terms. As the vegetative system becomes
habituated by repeated experience to react in the same way to the same
stimulus, permutations and combinations of wishes become possible
until at length the inscrutable complexities of the behaviour of
civilized man are evolved. We have to thank Von Bechterew, the
greatest of Russian physiologists, for these fundamental principles,
so important for the understanding of the control of human life and
conduct.
The associated reflex, aboriginal ancestor of the involved train
of associations that constitute the highest thought, conduct and
character, is the unit of the system. Recall the classic example
cited. If a piece of meat is shown to a dog, his mouth waters. If now
you proceed to ring a bell before offering the meat, his mouth will
water only when he sees or smells the meat. If, however, the ringing
of the bell precedes the meat a sufficient number of reactions, a time
comes when merely the sound of the bell will cause salivation, without
the presence of the meat. So it is with the associated reactions of
the internal secretions. A stimulus originally indifferent to the
endocrines may, by association, the laws of which are many, come to
act like a spark to the endocrine-instinct mechanism. Hence we can
account for the subtle play of instinct throughout all thinking.
Even objects resembling the specific excitant of an instinct only
remotely, or in some one quality, may start its mechanism and a host
of associations bound up with it. Thus the maternal instinct may
be excited by the sight of a baby. But because a baby is small and
delicate, anything small and fine, a tiny book, a toy, a miniature,
may arouse it. The object is then said to be appealing. The doctrine
of association of instinctive and so of endocrine reactions enables
us to understand the feeling--tone that at any moment pervades
consciousness as well as its content.
Choices, the psychology of selection of food, color, friends, mates,
amusements also become explicable rationally. For conflicts among
the different components of the vegetative system are continuous and
inevitable. If the pressure within a viscus has been heightened, and
persists, that is, is not disturbed by some other associated factor or
instinct, conduct results to lower the pressure to what it was before
the instigator of the tension appeared. But if another instinct is
sparked, or another associated factor comes into play, another focus
of increased pressure within the vegetative system is created, with
another stream of energy flowing to the brain and demanding an outlet.
This clash of instincts, the struggle between different foci of the
vegetative system competing for the possession of the brain, is a
common everyday process in conduct. Which will win means which will
will. And so we have an energetic basis for volition.
Which will win appears to depend primarily upon the kind of endocrines
that predominate in the make-up of the individual, secondarily with
his education. For it is the endocrines that are really in conflict
when there is a struggle between two instincts. And if one endocrine
system conquers, it must be either because it is inherently stronger,
its secretion potential, that is, the amount of secretion it can put
forth as a maximum, is greater (so explaining the term dominant)--or
because a past experience has conditioned it to respond, although the
opposing endocrine system does not. Fear and anger, respectively bound
up with the activities of the adrenal medulla and cortex, we shall
see, provide as good exemplars as any of this process.
The response of the ductless glands to situations varies with their
congenital _capacity_, and acquired _susceptibility_. Capacity is
a question of internal chemistry, modifiable by injury, disease,
accident, shock, exhaustion. Susceptibility depends upon the play of
the forces focusing upon them that may be summed up as associations.
In the ability of one endocrine system to inhibit another we have the
germ of the unconscious. Hence the modus operandi of the repressions
and suppressions, compensations and dissociations, which may unite to
integrate or refuse to integrate, and so disintegrate and deteriorate
a personality.
As the personality develops, the vegetative system becomes susceptible
to the manifold associates of family, school, church and society, art,
science and religion, and last but not least sex. All the different
nuances of personality are expressions of a particular relationship,
transitory or permanent, between the endocrines and the viscera
and muscles. Conversely, behaviour shows what a person actually is
chemically; that is, what endocrine and vegetative factors predominate
in his make-up.
FEAR, ANGER, AND COURAGE
Fear and anger are the oldest and so the most deep-rooted of the
instincts. An ameba, contracting at the touch of some unpleasant
object, feels fear in its most primitive form. And anger, the
destructive passion, must have appeared early upon the scene of life.
Certainly these two instincts were definitely developed and fixed in
the cells before sex differentiation and the sex instincts were born
at all. It is interesting to note this for our rabid Freudians.
Fear and anger involve the adrenal gland. How comes it that two states
of mind so contrasted should involve the same area? The answer lies in
the bipartite construction of the adrenal. All the evidence points
to its medulla as the secretor of the substance which makes for the
phenomena of fear, and to its cortex as dominant in the reactions of
anger.
When adrenalin is injected under the skin in sufficient quantity, it
will produce paleness, trembling, erection of the hair, twitching of
the limbs, quick or gasping breathing, twitching of the lips--all the
classic manifestations of fear. These are the immediate effects of
fear because they are the immediate effects of excess adrenalin in the
blood upon the vegetative viscera and the muscles. The perception
by associative memory of these effects of adrenalin, the sensations
arising from the organs affected, constitute the emotion of fear.
Flight follows by muscle prepared for flight, for the disturbance of
the inter-muscular equilibrium tenses the flexor muscles, the muscles
of flight, and relaxes the extensor muscles, the muscles of attack.
If, it would seem, the cortex secretion now pours into the blood,
enough to more than overcome the effects of the medulla secretion, the
inter-muscular equilibrium is disturbed in the opposite direction,
for fight rather than flight, and anger results. Or if the cortical
secretion pours in an overwhelming amount of its secretion from the
first into the blood there will be no fear, but anger immediately.
Habitually charging and fearless animals like the bison, bull, tiger,
or lion have a relatively larger cortex in their adrenals. Habitually
fleeing and fearful animals, like the rabbit, have a small cortex
and a wide medulla in their adrenals. The reinforcing action of the
thyroid is important. The adrenal medulla reinforced by the thyroid
makes for terror, the adrenal cortex reinforced by the thyroid makes
for fury.
Some people are not easily frightened, others are more readily
frightened, and still others are of an extremely fearful nature. It
depends upon the proportion of adrenal cortex to medulla secretion in
them. And their reaction to fear stimuli is a pretty good measure
of the ratio. These formulations apply more particularly to fear in
general and anger in general. But even in the least fearsome, i.e.,
an individual in whom cortex dominates medulla, there may be
fear--complexes, dating back to events and times when medulla
overtopped cortex, especially childhood. So in the coolest people,
certain persons, objects, episodes, may send a wave along an old line
of nerve cells and paths which lead to the adrenal medulla, and so
flood him with fear, terror or even panic before his usual cortex
response occurs. Impressions during the early years of childhood,
probing of the unconscious by various methods, have been shown to be
the most potent in this respect. Sometimes the episode goes further
back than childhood, and one must assume an inherited conditioning
of the vegetative and endocrine systems. An animal leaping upon an
ancestor in a forest during the night might account for the panic fear
some people experience when alone in the dark, that nothing of their
childhood history may account for.
In women, the adrenal medulla naturally tends to overtop the cortex,
because the latter makes for masculinity. Besides, the recurring
cycle in the ovary, making the corpus luteum, evolves an additional
stimulant to the medulla, through its irritating influence upon the
thyroid. Then the influence of the post-pituitary is anti-adrenal
cortex. So that, on the whole, a number of endocrines work to render
woman naturally fearful, as we say.
Courage is so closely related to fear and anger that all are always
associated in any discussion. Courage is commonly thought of as the
emotion that is the opposite of fear. It would follow that courage
meant simply inhibition of the adrenal medulla. As a matter of fact,
the mechanism of courage is more complex. One must distinguish animal
courage and deliberate courage. Animal courage is literally the
courage of the beast. As noted, animals with the largest amounts of
adrenal cortex are the pugnacious, aggressive, charging kings of the
fields and forests. The emotion experienced by them is probably anger
with a sort of blood-lust, and no consideration of the consequences.
The object attacked acted like the red rag waved at a bull--it had
stimulated a flow of the secretion of the adrenal cortex, and the
instinct of anger became sparked, as it were, by the new condition
of the blood. In courage, deliberate courage, there is more than
instinct. There is an act of volition, a display of will. Admitting
that without the adrenal cortex such courage would be impossible, the
chief credit for courage must be ascribed to the ante-pituitary. It is
the proper conjunction of its secretion and that of the adrenal cortex
that makes for true courage. So it is we find that acts of courage
have been recorded most often of individuals of the ante-pituitary
type. Photographs are obtainable of thirty-four winners of the
Congressional Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery in the War
with Germany. Of these twenty-three exhibited the somatic criteria or
hormonic signs of the ante-pituitary type. A prerequisite for adequate
ante-pituitary function is a normal secretion of the interstitial
cells of the reproductive glands. Cowardice is said to be a feature of
eunuchs.
THE PITUITARY AND INSTINCT
We have seen that, more than any other gland or tissue of the body,
the post-pituitary governs the maternal-sexual instincts and their
sublimations, the social and creative instincts. A great deal of
evidence is in our possession concerning the disturbances of emotion
accompanying disturbances of this gland, and controllable by its
control. It might be said to energize deeply the tender emotions, and
instead of saying soft-hearted we should say much-pituitarized.
For all the basic sentiments (as opposed to the intellectualized
self-protective sentimentalism), tender-heartedness, sympathy and
suggestibility are interlocked with its functions. Its secretion must
act upon the great basal ganglia, at the base of the brain, which
contain the nerve cells and fibres that are the centers of emotional
control and co-ordination.
The ante-pituitary has been depicted as the gland of intellectuality
(to use that term for lack of better). By intellectuality we mean
the capacity of the mind to control its environment by concepts and
abstract ideas. The frontal lobes of the brain are the central offices
for higher thought. Their cells are the most complex, have the most
numerous branches and association fibres. They store the fruits of
abstract thinking, mathematics, for example. The anterior pituitary is
in the closest relation and contact with them. Its secretion is tonic
to them. Now the instinct that is the forerunner of intellectuality
is the instinct of curiosity, with its emotion of wonder, and its
expression in the various constructive and acquisitive tendencies.
Studies of intellectual men, and of those with a keen instinct of
curiosity and a constructive-acquisitive trend prove them to be
ante-pituitary dominant in their make-up. The administration of
ante-pituitary extract to some defectives increases intellectual
activity and self-control. The future of intelligence may expect
a great deal from the newer chemistry of the secretions of the
ante-pituitary.
Two most important instincts, therefore, which in the complexity of
their sublimations have created most of the institutions of society,
the maternal and the intellectual, are connected directly with a
proper function of the pituitary endocrines. So it happens that
disturbances of these instincts, reaching far into the normal and
intellectual spheres of the mind, are definitely connected with
disturbances of the pituitary. As we shall note in reviewing the
essentials of the pituitary-centered or pituito-centric personality,
the personality governed by the fluctuations of activity within the
pituitary, people with injured, diseased or mechanically limited
pituitaries (because of the smallness of the bony case enclosing them)
exhibit defects and perversions of conduct and intelligence directly
attributable to affections of the very instincts and functions
the pituitary governs. Children with small, mechanically cramped
pituitaries lie and steal, are bed-wetters, have poor control over
themselves, and a low learning capacity.
THE THYROID AND INSTINCT
The chemical mechanism of the instincts described: sex libido, passion
and jealousy in relation to the ovaries and testes, fear and anger in
relation to the adrenals, sympathy and curiosity in relation to the
pituitaries, suggests that a similar explanation will hold for the
dynamics of the other instincts. In the closest relation to the
thyroid appear the instincts first isolated, so to speak, by McDougall
as the instincts of self-display and self-effacement, accompanied
by emotions of pride and shame respectively. In certain states of
excessive thyroid activity there is an extra stimulation of the
instinctive display of the person which may go on to boasting,
mania and exhibitionism. On the other hand, in states of thyroid
insufficiency, depression is produced, which may go on to melancholia,
a desire to be alone, to hide, to sit apart and even a tendency to
accuse the self of various uncommitted crimes and sins. In the form
of cyclic insanity known as the manic-depressive psychosis, mania
alternates with depression, as if the personality were dominated
wholly in turn by one or the other of these two instincts of the ego.
There is a good deal of evidence that behind them is a corresponding
fluctuation in the amount the thyroid secretes into the blood. Among
the thyroid-centered attitudes toward the self gyrate more than in
any other type. Egomania and megalomania occur most often in thyroid
unstable individuals.
ENERGY AND SENSITIVITY
In his classic Inquiries into Human Faculty, Francis Galton laid down
some fundamental considerations concerning energy and sensitivity
as mental traits. Energy he defined as the capacity for labor, and
declared it to be the measure of the fullness of life or vitality.
Statistical study by him of men of genius and their ancestors showed
them to be endowed with a large amount of energy. It has been said to
be the absolute prerequisite of genius. Now if there is a single fact
that has been well established by investigations of the internal
secretions, it is that the energy quantum of an individual is a
function of and determined by his thyroid. The more thyroid he has,
the more energetic will he be--the less thyroid the less energetic,
and the lazier. The thyroid-centered individual, of the excess thyroid
type, actually burns up more food and produces more heat than the
ordinary organism. He burns himself up faster in general.
When the thyroid sends more secretion into the blood, more thyroxin,
it accelerates all the functions and activities of the organs. Tea and
coffee produce loquacity because they stimulate the thyroid. People
with thyroid dominant constitutions talk fluently, rapidly, and
continuously. Their energy makes them doers, actors rather than
spectators. They get up early in the morning, are on the go all day
without surcease or fatigue, go to bed late, and often suffer from
insomnia.
Thyroid deficients, however, are definitely the opposite. They are
quite conscious of the limited reserve of energy at their command.
Also that they need plenty of refreshing sleep. Early to bed and late
to rise remains the leading maxim of health for them. In addition they
find it necessary to sleep during the day. Forty winks or more in
the afternoon makes a good deal of difference to them. Taciturn,
inarticulate, lazy, slow, tired, are the adjectives applied to them
by their friends as well as by their enemies. All because of an
insufficient or inefficient supply of the thyroid's iodine to their
cells. The mobility of energy in an organism is a measure of the
amount of active iodine in it. The physiologic synonyms for "energetic
and lazy" are "well-iodinized" and "poorly iodinized."
Sensitivity, the ability to discriminate between grades of sensation
or acuteness of perception is another thyroid quality. Just as the
thyroid plus is more energetic, so is he more sensitive. He feels
things more, he feels pain more readily, because he arrives more
quickly at the stage when the stimulus damages his nerve apparatus.
The electric conductivity of his skin is greater, sometimes a hundred
times greater, than the average. Conversely the thyroid deficient type
has a low discriminative faculty. Galton has recorded that idiots
hardly distinguish between heat and cold and that their sense of pain
is so obtuse that some of the more idiotic seem hardly to know what it
is. Cretins may moan but never shed tears.
Energy and sensitivity in an individual should direct attention to the
thyroid element predominating in his composition. Lack of energy and
insensitivity to the degree of thyroid insufficiency in their make-up.
MEMORY, JUDGMENT, AND POISE
In between sensitivity and energy, the sensation and the reaction,
comes a passage of the stimulus through the gauntlet of the stored
past experience of the individual known as memory. Many hypotheses
have been advanced by philosophers, psychologists and physiologists to
explain the phenomenona of memory. To conceive of memory materially
at all one must admit some sort of memory trace as the basis for the
persistence of memory. This memory deposit facilitates the occurrence
of the chemical reaction constituting the memory along the same path
the next time. Forgetting then consists in a disappearance of these
memory traces or deposits. Forgetting is greatest in the first hour
after remembering, more than half of the memory trace being lost in
that time. Comparison of the curve of forgetting, and the curve
of diffusion of a colloid like gelatine from its solution, into a
surrounding medium, shows them to be exceedingly similar. Forgetting
may be explained by some such loss of the memory trace or deposit into
the blood continually flowing by it.
The internal secretions influence the amount and duration of the
memory deposits. The thyroid appears to be essential to the _laying
down_ of the memory trace. Cretins have poor memories on the retention
side and so cannot learn. The memory of thyroid insufficients is
wretched. In the extreme grades, the memory for recent occurrences
becomes completely lost. Iodine and thyroid increase the electric
conductivity of the brain, so that the memory trace must be deposited
more easily in those who have an excess of thyroid. Removal of the
thyroid produces a degeneration of nerve cells and their processes,
and associative memory becomes difficult or impossible because
conduction from cell to cell is interfered with. If sufficient thyroid
is fed in excess, brain conduction may be so facilitated that epilepsy
may result upon slight irritation.
On the other hand, the pituitary seems to be related to _preservation_
of the memory deposit. In conditions of disease of the pituitary,
loss of memory for past experiences is more marked. As regards recent
experiences, they are better held, although in a sort of subconscious
manner, recoverable when the condition improves or is cured. But the
greatest difference between the thyroid and pituitary effects upon
memory exists as regards material: the thyroid memory applies
particularly to perception and percepts, the pituitary to conception
(reading, studying, thinking) and concepts.
Judgment is another mental process that often intervenes between
sensation and the energy-reaction. It involves memory and association
of experiences. Behind it is an attitude as much as there is in an
emotion or the arousing of an instinct. Beliefs and reasonings are
complex judgments. They form the units of the intellectual process.
There is an element of speed in judgment on reasoning as in perception
and memory. And as in the latter, the thyroid determines the velocity.
Quick thinking, as we call it, means good thyroid action, and slow
thinking deficient thyroid action. The other element in judgment,
accuracy, is influenced by the ante-pituitary. During adolescence
there is physical growth which consumes most of the secretion of the
ante-pituitary. After adolescence, after the early twenties, when
physical growth has ceased, the ante-pituitary secretion sensitizes
the cells of the brain to mental growth. The reaction potential of
the ante-pituitary, that is its inherent, latent ability to supply a
maximum of its endocrine for the nerve cells of the frontal lobes, is
the best-known chemical determinant of intellectual genius. It makes
for the greatest co-ordination of experience, knowledge, information,
tastes and problems into one harmonious whole. And curiously, not only
does it cause a fusion of intellectual material: it creates a desire
for and a love of such material.
We should expect to find extraordinarily well-developed ante-pituitary
action among eminent philosophers and men of science, and we do.
Adequate action of it is present throughout the range of normals who
evidence sufficiently ripened judgment as they progress through
life. The ability to profit by experience, and to make more and more
accurate judgments as one grows older implies at least a maximum
efficiency of it. This maturation is not at all universal. Even after
middle age, after forty and fifty years of reasoning, some individuals
retain the juvenile mind of their youth. Like the Bourbons, they
have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Their ante-pituitary
insufficiency often coupled with a post-pituitary excess, and other
instabilities and disequilibriums in the endocrine system, render them
immature morons, compared with what might be expected of them for
their years. They are the people who are old enough to know better.
For the same reasons, inhibition and emotional control are poor in
them.
Besides the ante-pituitary, in the evolution of judgment, and the
judgment faculty, due stress must be laid upon the influence of the
internal secretion of the testes or ovaries, the product of the
interstitial cells. Although the probability is that the effects
are indirect, through a stimulation of the ante-pituitary, the fact
remains that, in a child, memory may be marvelous and judgment poor
(such memory is possibly purely thyroid in its determination). With
the advent of the gonads upon the scene, judgments become the centre
of the play's plot undoubtedly. The intelligence of eunuchs and
eunuchoids is in general low. The skull and brain of castrates, animal
and human, is smaller than the average. Gall, the physiologist who
popularized ideas concerning the meaning of the protuberances and
depressions of the head in relation to faculty and character, early in
the nineteenth century, was the first to prove this. Among historic
castrates, eunuchs, not a single example of great intellect, of the
creative type, is known. On the contrary, the native gifts of the mind
were destroyed. Thus Abelard, who was punished with castration by his
uncle for his love affair with Heloeise, never composed a verse of
poetry thereafter.
IMAGINATION AS AN ENDOCRINE GIFT
That brings us to the consideration of imagination as influenced by
the endocrines. The physical conditions of exercise of the imaginative
faculty have not been sufficiently investigated. Alcohol has long been
known to act as an evocant of strange images. The hallucinations of
delirium tremens are the results obtained in extreme intoxication. A
strangely imaged flow of consciousness, the imaginative state, may
also be evoked by morphine and cannabis indica. There is no doubt
that the brain cells may be made to combine in the fresh, novel, and
unfamiliar associations that are recognized as unreal.
Francis Galton, pioneer student of the conditionings of human faculty,
left an interesting study of the visualising capacity, so far as it
could be attacked by the statistical method. Two of his conclusions
are worth repeating for our purposes. One is that the power to imagine
is poor in philosophers and men of science. The other that it is
higher in the female sex than in the male. We have seen that the
philosophic, scientific, intellectual mind, the capacity to abstract,
and think in terms of abstractions, is definitely dependent upon
proper secretion by the ante-pituitary. In woman, the post-pituitary
is generally predominant over the ante-pituitary. Though we are in
need of a series of studies of the endocrine traits and composition of
men endowed with high imaginative qualities, and so are at a loss, we
have indications of an endocrine control of the state of consciousness
we speak of as the imaginative.
Most of the evidence accumulated in the examination and treatment of
morbid conditions characterized by a restless, incoordinate activity
of the brain cells points to excess of the post-pituitary secretion as
the cause, or as one of the most important causes. The thyroid and the
adrenal medulla also exert their influence. But the strongest appears
to be the post-pituitary. Phobias, fears which obsess the mind,
anxiety neuroses, suspicions, hallucinations, delusions, nervousness,
all expressions of what we may sum up technically as the imaginative
state of mind, occur and occur frequently, associated with other
symptoms of posterior pituitary overactivity. Persons in whose make-up
it rules are more liable to imagine disturbances of their mentality,
or exhibit a well-developed imaginative streak. Normal states of
overactivity of the post-pituitary such as occur in some women during
the menstrual period and pregnancy, and in some men as part of the
endocrine cycle of their everyday lives, are accompanied by increase
in the susceptibility and vigor of the imagination. Whether the
feeding of excess post-pituitary would lead to a stimulation of the
tendency or ability to imagine is still to be decided. But it is
known that quieting the post-pituitary by various means will cause
a depression of the faculty, and eliminate its pathologic
manifestations.
Psychologists distinguish between the constructive imagination that
expresses itself in an ordered activity and the unbalanced fancies
of the fearful neurotic for example. The post-pituitary confers the
lability of the underlying state of brain in all of these imaginative
tincturings of consciousness. The constructive imagination, one of the
few truly precious gifts of a personality, is probably the expression
of a certain balanced activity of the ante-pituitary and the
post-pituitary.
MOODS AND THE ORGANIC OUTLOOK
The lability the post-pituitary confers upon the combinations of
perceptions and conceptions, grouped as the imagined, extends to
the ruling mood that may be spoken of as the organic outlook.
Post-pituitary in excess, without compensation or balancing by one or
some of the other endocrines, is associated with an instability of
mood and the organic outlook. Concomitant is a defective self-control.
Typically, one sees the effects in the mental abnormalities of women
during the premenstrual period. A number of them have their pituitary
balance upset then, with an overtopping of the ante-pituitary by the
post-pituitary. Irritability, a sub-hysteria, or an actual hysteria
may emerge in the usually most placid characters. A quiet wife and
mother may go for her husband, curse and mortify him, even strike and
beat him. She may slap her children at that time and no other. It is
well known that most of their crimes are committed by women during the
menstrual period. So are the suicides. Deterioration of mentality and
character so often observed during the menopause, with its apathies or
excitements, melancholia or mania, the fits of weeping or gaiety, the
loss of grip upon reality, the complete change in mood and temperament
that reflect the transformation of the organic outlook, demonstrate
clearly the overwhelming influence of the endocrines upon the
attitudes of the self toward the self.
It is possible to speak of thyroid moods, adrenal moods,
ante-pituitary or post-pituitary moods, gonadal moods. Each of
these is the echo in the mind of cells stimulated or depressed,
by concentration or dilution in the blood of particular internal
secretions. Restlessness and excitement can be produced experimentally
by feeding thyroid. Vague anxiety, depressive fancies and fears,
imaginative overactivity can be removed by inhibiting the
post-pituitary. Hypersecretion of the ovary will cause a sexual
susceptibility and a mood of genital obsession, capable of the most
remarkable sublimations and perversions.
CHAPTER IX
THE BACKGROUNDS OF PERSONALITY
The question of moods and sublimations once raised introduces the
problem of the relation of neuroses, nervous disorders without an
organic disease basis, and mental abnormalities, to the endocrine
system. Obviously, in view of all the influences exerted by the
ductless glands upon every organ and function of the body and mind,
and their intermediary, the vegetative nervous system, a relation must
exist. Observations accumulated, some of which have been referred to
in the preceding chapters, prove the complete, though complex, reality
of such a deduction.
The history of attitudes toward nerve and mental disorders is a
remarkable illustration of the vicissitudes of ignorance playing with
words. The Greeks, swayed and dazzled as they were by the magic of
words which they discovered, yet never permitted themselves to be
fooled by them. As an explanation for the phenomena of hysteria in
women, that benign mental disorder par excellence, they had the theory
of a wandering about of the womb in the organism as a cause. That
provided an image of something material happening as an explanation.
With the triumphs of anatomy after the Renaissance, that naive view
had to be discarded. In its place the humoral theory held sway, with
its good humors and its bad humors, and their bilious, lymphatic,
nervous and sanguine admixtures. But that, too, went the way of all
flesh. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a popular
phrase, "nerves," paraphrased by practitioners of medicine as
neuroses, then came into vogue as the efficient cause of these
troubles. "Nerves" indeed today have filtered everywhere into the
common consciousness.
Because of the irritant effects of light, food and social conditions,
America has come to swarm with neurotics of every type, especially the
sexual. A rich field was created for cults of treatment, which spring
up like weeds periodically all over the country. We have seen how the
American, Beard, was inspired by the idea that "nerves" represented a
loss of tone, a flabbiness, weakness and softness of the nerves, to
coin the word neurasthenia. Nerve exhaustion he believed was the cause
of the nerve weakness. Weir Mitchell, another American, introduced the
rest cure combined with overfeeding as a treatment for it.
An analytical French neurologist, Charcot, was not to be satisfied by
words of Latin-Greek derivation. Insisting upon the significance of
the individual mental workings of each case, he and his pupil Janet
began to unravel a tangle which has led to the present revolution in
psychology. For Freud, Jung and Adler took up the story where Janet
left off.
Janet elaborated the ideas of a subconscious and an unconscious, a
dissociation of the components of the mind, and a splitting of
the personality. Lumping the phenomena of amnesia, somnambulism,
hypnotism, anesthesia, obsession and hysteria into the grand group of
mental dissociations and disintegrations, he achieved a unification
never considered possible before him. Suggestion as a mode of cure was
also emphasized and elaborated by him to an undreamed-of degree.
Freud, in 1895, studying a case of hysteria with Breuer, had attempted
cure by the method of free association, attempting to get the hysteric
to pour out her mental life. Not succeeding, and his interest aroused
by her continual references to her dreams, he discovered that by means
of those dreams he could tap the subconscious and unconscious in
regions hitherto inaccessible. For in the dreams, ideas, persons, and
experiences appeared that never came upon the stage of the conscious.
From that finding he developed the concept of repression, i.e., the
relegation of a painful experience into the unconscious, and kept
imprisoned there by the censor. Also how there it became the complex,
which, like a stage manager, never appeared before the footlights of
the conscious, but determined its content just the same by inhibition
or stimulation of any character or scene to be enacted upon it.
A complete critique of Freudianism cannot be attempted here. But in
relation to the endocrine system as controllers of nerve function
in health and disease, a valid criticism can be made. Firstly, the
Freudian jargon, its technicalities and explanations, are metaphors.
Some may regard them as justifiable descriptions of mental processes.
But it certainly can be urged against them that they provide us with
no idea concerning what is happening in the cells of the body and
brain as explanation for the event, normal or abnormal, supposedly
explained. Words like sublimation or transference are figures of
speech and nothing else. Secondly, they ignore totally the powers of
the vegetative apparatus, the viscera, muscles and secreting glands
together, as originators and determiners of the wish and its
adventures.
How utterly different, from the point of view of the physiologist, the
two explanations are as pictures, can be seen from a single example.
The idea of repression, to the Freudian, means the pushing down
into the subconscious of some experience. Pushing down is a process
controlled by the laws of physics: it involves the concepts of matter
and force. Hence, the expression, as a description of a psychic
episode, is a metaphor pure and simple. From the standpoint of the
process of repression as pictured by the student of the vegetative
apparatus, the term signifies a real bottling up of energy. For the
repression means actual compression of muscle, the muscle contained
in the viscera. And the repression means a real interference with
the release of energy, which remains bound up, tugging for room
for expression as much as a spring tightly coiled in a box. In the
production of that tension an endocrine has often been decisive. The
endocrine nature of the individual may decide whether a subconscious,
i.e., visceral or vegetative tension, is to come into being, live
or die, in the face of a given situation. If thereby, a permanent
disturbance of the equilibrium between the components is brought
about, a neurosis, expression of an unsatisfied vegetative tension,
follows.
It has been hailed as a brand new discovery by those following the
latest in psychology that the subconscious and the unconscious
constitute a more essential component of the personality than the
conscious. As a matter of fact, common practice has recognized the
fact, if not the mechanism and its significance, for ages. It is not
what people say or do--it is how they say it: that is how the true
reactions of personality are recognized instinctively even by animals.
Tone and gesture (when not acted or posed) are accepted as symbols and
symptoms of states of the inmost sancta sanctorum that words and wit
never give entrance to, nay disguise and block. Tone and gesture as
revelations of the Inner-Me, the True-Me or Intra-Me if you will,
are so potent because they are direct expressions of the vegetative
apparatus. The curl of a lip, the flicker of an eye-lash, the twitch
of a shoulder are the overflow of energy cramped in the increased
intravisceral pressure, determined by increased outflow of endocrine
secretion. Wittingly or unwittingly we interpret the little signs as
messages from the deepest self, which they truly are.
NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS AND SHELL SHOCK
In civil life, the complex of symptoms Beard jumbled together as
neurasthenia, when associated with a loss of self-control, so that the
sufferer is incapacitated for the duties of everyday life, has become
the popular "nervous breakdown." A sanitarium appears to be one of the
necessary components of the condition. It is the last act, the climax
of "nerves."
During the War of 1914-1918, thousands of cases of functional
disorders of the nervous came to be grouped under "Shell Shock."
The psychic phenomena in the wake of concussion of the brain due to
explosives suggested the term, and its application to affections of
self-control, or dissociations of the personality, with paralysis,
blindness, speechlessness, loss of hearing and so on. The War neurosis
(including those arising in home service) is still a topical subject
because thousands of mentally disabled soldiers are alive.
In view of what has been said concerning the endocrine mechanism of
the instincts and the vegetative apparatus, it could be predicted that
a number of these nerve casualties of peace and war would be caused by
an upset of the equilibrium between the glands of internal secretion.
A study of war neuroses by the great Italian student of the
endocrines, Pende, confirms this assumption. As emphasized, the
internal secretions are like tuning keys, and tighten or loosen the
strings of the organism-instrument, the nerves. War for the soldier,
or the civilian combatant as well, sets the strings vibrating, and
with them the glands controlled by them. Excessive stimulation or
depression of an endocrine will disturb the whole chain of hormones,
and the vegetative system, and their echoes in the psyche. The nervous
disorders of war that have been lumped as shell shock or war shock may
be looked upon as uncompensated; airings of the endocrine vegetative
mechanism, as dislocations of parts and processes that are reflected
outwardly as ailment or disease.
AN ENDOCRINE NEUROSIS
An exquisite example of an endocrine neurosis, that is a disorder of
nerves and brain dependent upon an upset of the equilibrium between
the internal secretions due to a trying experience, was furnished
recently by the reactions of three naval officers lost in the snow
wilds of Canada through a balloon adventure. The cases aroused a good
deal of interest at the time, and the details were reported by the
newspapers as if they were the episodes of a serial mystery story.
The three officers started out late one fine evening from Rockaway
Air Station in a balloon for a practice trip. Atmospheric conditions
suddenly changed, they became lost in the clouds, and finally landed
somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. The commander of the balloon
crew, Lieut. A., 23 years old, was the youngest of the three; the
oldest, Lieut. B., being 45, and the third man in the thirties, Lieut.
C.
According to the testimony given at the Court of Inquiry held
afterwards, two hours after they abandoned the balloon and started
struggling through the snow, B. became tired and complained of his
fatigue. B.'s fatigue increased, and two days later became so great
that the party had to stop for an hour and build a fire in order to
permit him to rest. However, an hour proved too little: and in another
half hour he was falling and fainting.
Letters written by C. to his wife and gotten hold of by reporters
declared that B. at this juncture passed into a semi-sane state, in
which he accused himself of a number of sins, and volunteered to
commit suicide, so that the others would not be burdened by his
weakness. Also, that they might use his body to fortify themselves. A.
discussed with C. the advisability of taking B.'s knife away from
him. Living on their carrier pigeons, they continued on, moved by a
desperate hope of finding someone. B. had several fainting spells
after drinking water traced by moose tracks.
Luck favored them, and they encountered an Indian who guided them to
a place called Moose Factory. Here they wrote the letters home which
reached their wives and the daily press before they themselves
returned to civilization. A great hue and cry was raised by the
newspapers about their plight. Newspaper correspondents vied with each
other for the honor of being the first to meet them and get their
story.
They arrived at a collection of houses named Mattice. A. and C.
proceeded ahead and found instructions for them not to talk. C. went
back to B., who was in a shack with the correspondents full of the
story of the letters. B. became enraged and struck C. who retained his
self-control.
Differences were patched up, and the three returned together to New
York. There the medical examination of the three showed that the four
days in the wilderness had left its deepest effects upon the physique
and mind of B. In a few days he developed an attack of tonsillitis,
with fever, and a mental disturbance described by the medical officer
as exhaustion psychosis. He believed this condition to be the result
of severe exhaustion, prolonged anxiety, worry, and extreme exposure.
Extreme restlessness and irritability, confusion of thought and
an undefined perplexity, all the prominent symptoms of exhaustion
psychosis, making him hyperactive and inclined to acts of violence,
were in evidence.
The physique, character and reactions of Lieut. B. are what interest
us in the case. The pictures of him published, and the structure of
his skull, face and teeth, his hair and other physical traits point to
his being an adrenal-centered type, of the unstable variety, so far as
his internal secretion make-up is concerned. As we shall see in the
next chapter on the different kinds of endocrine personalities,
the unstable adrenocentric (convenient name for the class) is
characterized by rapid exhaustibility because under conditions of
stress and strain, the reserve of the gland is consumed. The adrenal
glands, we noted in a preceding chapter, are concerned with the
maintenance of muscle and nerve tone in emergencies. They are the
glands which, during crises especially, control the production and
supply of energy to the various organs and tissues called upon to
function to the utmost in emergencies. When the adrenals fail, as they
do readily in these labile adrenocentrics, it is as if the adrenals
were cut out of the body. And it has been repeatedly shown that
extirpation of the adrenals is immediately followed by degeneration
and breakdown of the brain cells.
These facts explain the reactions of Lieut. B. The acute call upon his
adrenals made by his dangerous situation probably soon exhausted them
of their content of reserve secretions. Overwhelming fatigue with loss
of muscle tone followed. The changes in the brain caused him to talk
as he did in the wilderness. Returned to safety, the news that his
reputation was under fire because of C.'s letter brought out another
adrenal characteristic: the excessive instinct of pugnacity, easily
stimulated, with its emotion of anger and the tendency to violence.
What is spoken of as a quick temper is an adrenocentric trait.
Returned to New York, an infection, tonsillitis, attacked him.
Infections in adrenocentrics use up the content of the adrenals as
rapidly as physical exhaustion or emotion. So the tonsillitis, which
in another type of individual would have been combatted continuously
by the adrenals and so passed by as a mere sore throat, presented him
with a high temperature, and the brain disturbance described by the
medical officer as exhaustion-psychosis, with again a tendency to
violence. In short, the history of his adventure is the history of his
adrenals under stress and strain. It illustrates the mechanism of a
typical endocrine neurosis.
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE VISCERA
In the chapter on the glands of internal secretion as an interlocking
directorate, certain generalities were stated as the laws of the
government of the organism's life by them in association with the
vegetative apparatus. It was put forward as a fundamental revision of
the theory, hitherto accepted, of the limitation of mind to the brain
cells. We think and feel not alone with the brain, but with our
muscles, our viscera, our vegetative nerves, and last but not least
our endocrine organs. In short, we think and feel with each and every
part of ourselves.
Among these pristine factors determining the content of consciousness,
the endocrines are most important, because they alone to start with,
of all the other factors, are different in each and every individual.
They are what render him unique at birth, even though he looks the
counterpart of millions of other babies born at the same time. They
constitute his inner destiny. As he grows, the external factors,
social experiences, climate, accidents, and disease modify and
condition the reactions and complexity of the endocrine system. As
these modifications and associations are of the greatest import for
the final elaboration of the personality, composing as they do the
elements of the unconscious which confers the unique stamp of normal,
abnormal, supernormal, or subnormal, it is worth while now to review
the most general of the determining laws. Man is an energy phenomenon,
both conscious and unconscious, with the energy emanating from the
endocrine-vegetative mechanisms. So it becomes possible for us,
by their aid, to analyze the conscious, the subconscious and the
unconscious with the terms long current in the analyses of physics.
1. Man is an energy machine which, though it is constantly losing
energy as a whole; consists of parts constantly accumulating energy
(as a result of inherent chemical reactions accelerated by the
absorption of food). This process of local accumulation of energy
associated with general loss of energy may be observed even in the
ameba, in the form of stored reserve food material. Evolution
created a system of organs, the viscera, as specialists in energy
conservation, utilization or transformation.
For intercommunication and interaction between the viscera two systems
were elaborated: a younger system of direct contacts, the nerves,
and nerve cells, through which influences could be conducted for the
stimulation, acceleration, retardation or inhibition of an energy
process in them; and the older, the endocrine gland association, for
the production of chemical substances to act as messengers to be sent
from one viscus to another, and also to the nerves, through the blood
or lymph which bathe all the cells. They could affect only one or
certain organs, because by selection only the chosen organ or organs
knew the code, as it were. The chemical system is much the older
system, and preceded the nerve system by aeons of time. The whole
system, viscera, visceral nerves and the endocrines gradually united
into a complete autonomous organism within the organism, and as such
functions as the vegetative apparatus.
EVOLUTION OF THE ENDOCRINES
2. In the course of evolution, variations occurred in all three
components of the apparatus, the viscera, the nerves, and the
endocrines. Now variations in the viscera and the nerves are
essentially grossly physical and quantitative. That is, there may be a
bigger stomach or a smaller stomach, larger nerve fibres or smaller.
And as Life always has worked with a large margin of safety, and
always played for safety first as regards quantity, these variations
have not become of much significance for the history and destiny of
the animal.
But variations among the endocrines made a tremendous difference. To
have very much thyroid and very little pituitary, much adrenal and not
enough parathyroid meant a great deal to the Organism as a whole,
as well as to the vegetative apparatus. For states of tension and
relaxation, activity and inactivity in the nerves and viscera would be
determined by these variations in the ratio between the variants. The
vegetative apparatus in its virginity, say in the new-born infant, may
be said to have its development primarily determined by the reaction
potentials of the endocrine part of it, that is the latent power of
each gland to secrete at a minimum or a maximum, and the balance
between them.
EDUCATION OF THE VEGETATIVE SYSTEM
3. Training or education involves, beside other effects, a training
of the endocrines, and hence of the entire vegetative apparatus, to
respond in a particular way to a particular stimulus. Experience is
like the introduction of new push-buttons, levers, and wheels into the
mechanism. All learning which calls out or arrests the functioning of
an instinct, must, from what we have learned of the chemical dynamics
of instincts as reactions between hormones, nerves and viscera, affect
the vegetative system. When there is a conflict between two or
more instincts, between pressures of energy flowing in different
directions, there may be compromise and normality, or a grinding of
the gears and abnormality.
Where does the brain come in, in all this? As the servant of the
vegetative apparatus. To call it the master tissue is manifestly
absurd, when it can only be the diplomatic constitutional monarch of
the system. It can, in fact, act only as the great central station
for associative memory, as only one of the factors implicated in
education.
The most powerful educative agents of the vegetative apparatus of a
human being are the other humans around him. And they comprise the
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