The Glands Regulating Personality Part 2

"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 quant.i.ty 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 a.s.sociation 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, s.e.x 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 const.i.tute 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 ATt.i.tUDE 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 quant.i.tative 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 inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sociated 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 superst.i.tion and prejudice. Its children and grandchildren have flourished and grown strong and mighty. They have trans.m.u.ted 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 a.s.sociated, 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 quant.i.tative 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 quant.i.tative a.n.a.lysis.

However desirable the purely quant.i.tative 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 mult.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 Trespa.s.sing, 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 cla.s.sical 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 ca.n.a.l-like pa.s.sage 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 pract.i.tioner 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 a.s.sured 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 a.n.a.lysis of the Blood," published in the year of the American Declaration of Independence. The s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.ses 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 quant.i.tatively 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 Muller, 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 nonent.i.ties, 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 s.e.x was the immediate occasion. s.e.x and s.e.x differences have always more or less obsessed the imagination of mankind. The volumes of theories about them would const.i.tute a respectable museum. Certain gross facts, however, were known. The effects of loss of the s.e.x glands upon the configuration of the body and the predominating const.i.tution 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 Gottingen, 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 G.o.ds. 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 cla.s.sified 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.