The Glands Regulating Personality Part 21

THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS IN HISTORY

According to the views, facts and guesses concerning human personality, as a body-mind complex dominated by the internal secretions, outlined in the preceding pages, biography, and human history as the interaction of biographies, become capable of interpretation from a new standpoint. If human life, in its essentials, is so much the product of the internal messenger system we speak of as the endocrines, then biography should present us with a number of ill.u.s.trations of their power and influence. What is the evidence that, as Huxley antic.i.p.ated, "the introduction into the economy of a molecular mechanism which, like a cunningly contrived torpedo, shall find its way to some particular group of living elements, and cause an explosion among them, leaving the rest untouched," and the multiplication of such cunningly contrived mechanisms, were responsible for those personalities, magnificent chemical compounds, with whose adventures historians are concerned?

THE CASE OF NAPOLEON

As a unique will and intelligence, Napoleon Bonaparte the First must be cla.s.sed as one of the Betelegeuses of the race. H.G. Wells has called his career the "raid of an intolerable egotist across the disordered beginning of a new time." "The figure of an adventurer and wrecker." "This saturnine egotist." "Are men dazzled simply by the scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?"

"This dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar." There are other opinions.

The Man of Destiny was worshipped by millions. Napoleona bring fortunes today. Interest in the man as a man has multiplied with every year. And certainly no one can deny him the quality of individuality in its most exaggerated form.

In the second place he belongs among the moderns. Modern science and methods of observation have had their chance at him, and have left a conscious record of their results. Napoleon was the central figure of his time, and was watched by trained medical eyes during his life, and after his death. Protocols of the examination of his body are accessible, and Napoleonic specimens, preserved by fixing agents, may still be viewed at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, England. Dr. Leonard Guthrie has worked up the material at hand in a report which he presented to the historical section of the International Congress of Medicine, in London in 1913. I propose to relate his findings to some other facts and the general principles roughly sketched in this book.

There are a number of word portraits of Napoleon extant. But for our purposes certain of the notable features of his face and physique are to be considered. The first characteristic that struck everyone about him was the matter of his height. He was definitely sub-average, at death being about five feet six inches in height. As has been emphasized several times, deficiency or excess of growth will always direct attention to the pituitary. His sharply outlined features and a powerful lower jaw, combined with oddly small plump hands, long straight black hair, and dark complexion, all point to the pituitary, with a secondary adrenal effect. His pulse was slow, according to Corvisart, his personal physician, rarely above 50 to the minute. His s.e.xual life, his libido, was abnormal. Curiously explosive in their appearance and manifestations were his s.e.xual impulses. They "beset him on occasions which were sometimes inconvenient, and a peculiarity about them was that they subsided with equal suddenness if not immediately gratified, or if meanwhile something occurred to discourage his attention. All women were to him 'filles de joie.'

s.e.xual rather than social attractions in women appealed to him."

He was never in love, never possessed of permanent affection or tenderness for any woman. This explosive periodicity of the s.e.xual life, "with a tendency to compression of it to the merely physical,"

is another mark of some pituitary-centered personalities.

Two other phenomena that persisted throughout his life throw light upon his endocrine const.i.tution. One was trouble with his bladder which he told Antommarchi, another physician, bothered him as long as he could remember. Irritability of the bladder was so p.r.o.nounced that he could not sleep for more than a few hours at a time. After battles, the trouble became worse so that it interfered with his riding.

Const.i.tutional difficulties in urination have been connected definitely with the function of the pituitary. The other pituitary disturbances which tinctured his life were certain "brain storms,"

attacks of vomiting followed by "stupor verging on unconsciousness"

brought on by outbursts of temper, physical overexertion, mental strain, or s.e.xual excitement. It has been shown that such epileptic tendencies are present in subjects of pituitary disease, particularly those with pituitary instability. In Napoleon's case the brain attacks may have been crises of pituitary insufficiency in a hyper-pituitary type. This supposition is borne out by the headache which followed them, the headache of an oversecreting pituitary compensating for a defect in its formation. During his prime, his intellect was mathematical, logical, and rational, and remarkable for a prodigious memory. Such an intellect is the product of an extraordinary ante-pituitary. That he never permitted feeling to interfere with the dictates of his judgment, a quality which rendered him the most unscrupulous careerist of history, must be put down to an insufficiency of the post-pituitary. What post-pituitary does to the brain cells and the organism as a whole to render them susceptible to sympathy and suggestion, the social sublimations of the maternal instinct, with its offsprings of religion and art, we have seen.

Napoleon lacked a chemical trace of the religious instinct, his sympathy was nil, and his conquests were made possible only because he was blind to the suffering and misery his greed for glory and dominion generated. Post-pituitary insufficients of this type, patent or concealed, gradually become corpulent as they grow older. The increasing corpulency of Napoleon was commented upon by all observers.

A student of his make-up, and acquainted with present developments concerning the internal secretions, given an opportunity to observe him as we have when he was alive, and at the height of his success, would have had every reason for cla.s.sing him a pituitary-centered, ante-pituitary superior, post-pituitary inferior, with an instability of both that would lead to his final degeneration. Besides, his insatiable energy indicated an excellent thyroid, his pugnacity, animality and genius for practical affairs a superb adrenal. Given the kind of pituitary he possessed, with its great intellectual potential energy and the relation between the two parts which would further the objects of an intellectual machine, plus a remarkable thyroid and adrenal, plus the military education Napoleon had, and the character of the Revolution into which he was plunged, and we have the conditions out of which his career emerged as inevitable.

That it was his pituitary which first failed him, rather than the thyroid or adrenal, which might have, is demonstrated by a number of considerations. Before he made himself Emperor, it was noticed that he was becoming fat, a pituitary symptom. A comparison of portraits at different stages of his rise and fall shows an increasing abdominal paunch, and a laying down of fat in the pituitary areas, around the hips, the legs and so on. The beginning of weakness in judgment that he was to exhibit soon in the invasion of Russia manifested itself at the same time. His keen calculating ability attained the peak of its curve at Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland. Thereafter, the descent begins. A rash, grandiose, speculative quality enters his projects, and divorces the elaborate coordination of means and end from his plans. That his thyroid energy capacity did not fail him is indicated by the fact that at St. Albans he would ride for three hours at the end of the day to tire himself sufficiently for sleep. That his adrenals were not affected is indicated by the brutality which remained characteristic to the end of his life.

The findings after death confirm the view of him as an unstable pituitocentric who succ.u.mbed to pituitary insufficiency toward the latter half of his life. We possess the account of the postmortem by Dr. Henry, who performed it. "The whole surface of the body was deeply covered with fat. Over the sternum, where generally the bone is very superficial, the fat was upwards of an inch deep, and an inch and a half or two inches on the abdomen. There was scarcely any hair on the body, and that of the head was thin, fine and silky. The whole genital system (very small) seemed to exhibit a physical cause for the absence of s.e.xual desire, and the chast.i.ty which had been stated to have characterized the deceased (during his stay at St. Helena). The skin was noticed to be very white and delicate as were the hands and arms.

Indeed the whole body was slender and effeminate. The pubis much resembled the Mons Veneris in women. The muscles of the chest were small, the shoulders were narrow and the hips wide." In other words, the typical feminization of the body which accompanies pituitary insufficiency was found. He died of a cancer of the stomach. But before his death there were noted the mental transformations that succeed deficiency of his central endocrine. Apathy, indolence, fatigability, and frilosity were what impressed his a.s.sociates at St.

Helena. The deterioration of his mentality was also exemplified in his literary diversions, the "Siege of Troy" and the "Essay on Suicide."

The puerility of these productions, as well as of his conduct, a sulking before his captors, and the decline of his physical energy, once a bottomless well, all point to the same conclusion.

The rise and fall of Napoleon followed the rise and fall of his pituitary gland. No better ill.u.s.tration exists of the fundamental determination of a personality and its career by an endocrine, aside from other factors of education, environment, accident and opportunity. Without the sort of endocrine equipment he was born with, however, none of the other factors would have found the material to work upon. Born, say, with more of a posterior pituitary than he had, which would have rendered him more sensitive to the sufferings of his fellow-creatures, if nothing else, and the forces of the Revolution probably would have swamped him from the very first moment of his emergence at Toulon, when the whiff of grape-shot, symptom of an inexorable, merciless intellect and will, started him upon the road that led to the Napoleonic Era. Destiny is always ironic. For the deficiency of the internal secretions which made him eligible for glory was responsible as well as for his downfall.

EPILEPSY AND MIGRAINE IN GENIUS

In the annals of genius, there occur a number of instances of those who suffered from attacks that have been diagnosed epilepsy or migraine. Because their ailment was a.s.sociated with their extraordinary ability, they attracted an attention that concerned itself not at all with the circ.u.mstance that genius has also been liable to measles, scarlet fever, and so on. Epilepsy and migraine certainly occur in people of no supernormal gifts, and often in degenerates and subnormals. Yet the fact remains that these affections of the nervous system, so terrible to feel and to behold, have afflicted the finest brains of the race.

About forty years ago the idea established itself that epilepsy, exhibiting itself in one form or another as "fits," and migraine, the severe periodic sick headache, were interconvertible manifestations of the same underlying morbid process in the brain. Nothing in the way of a concrete cause, attackable on the material side, was elicited by this generalization. Then the investigations of the pituitary in the last decade produced evidence of epilepsy-like and migraine-like symptoms in sufferers from tumors or other enlargements of it.

Reasoning back, cases of epilepsy and migraine began to be examined for evidences of involvement of the pituitary in their troubles.

These acc.u.mulated rapidly. The physiognomy and physique of the pituito-centric were discovered in them. The phenomena noted in Napoleon's case were often present: lowering of the pulse, chilliness, and an increased irritability of the bladder. In women the attack often coincides with the menstrual period, a typical time of endocrine unbalance. Finally X-ray examinations of the sella turcica, the bony lodging of the pituitary, clinched the matter: it often appeared small, or enlarged, with erosions of the bone, signifying a desperate attempt of the gland to grow, and meet the needs of the organism. The complex of appearances called migraine now becomes understandable.

There are a number of factors, such as fatigue, intense cold, or high sugar food like chocolate, which will cause an engorgement of the gland with blood and swelling of it. But they do not concern us now.

Intense mental occupation, concentration as the popular term has it, acts as a patent excitor of the attack.

Brain work drives more blood into the brain and the gland. Besides, mental activity is accompanied by increased function of the ante-pituitary, if intellectual, or of the post-pituitary if emotional. Brain work then causes a temporary enlargement of the gland. If, now, the bone container of the endocrine is too small to permit of much swelling, the bone will be pressed against or even worn into. This means headache, severe, easily going on to the kind known as sick-headache. The nerves which move the eyes in various directions lie next to the pituitary. If, in its expansion, it moves sufficiently outward, it may press upon, irritate them or paralyze, and so evolve various eye disturbances in a.s.sociation with the headache. No one can overrate this conception of migraine, for a number of men of genius have suffered from sick-headache and eye symptoms.

As for epilepsy, the problem is more complex. One has to rule out first those who have organic destructive disease of the brain. But they are out of our field: genius predicates at least an intact brain.

Of the others a number may be interpreted upon an endocrine basis. At least they will, in their physiognomy, physique, mentality, conduct and character, doc.u.ment the glandular constellation under which they live, and a proper understanding of which is necessary for them to be helped. One frequently seen is the thymo-centric, with small enclosed sella turcica. The latter fact explains the occurrence of the epilepsy. Periodic variations in the secretory tides of the other endocrines, the ovaries, the thyroid, and so on, may determine the onset of the attack of "fits." The point is that when epilepsy plays a constant part in the life history of a man of genius, we are justified in a.s.suming a disturbed balance among his hormones, and so a reasoned picture perhaps of the foundations for the erratic in his behaviour or his productions.

THE NEURASTHENIC GENIUS

The fin de siecle intelligentsia of the nineteenth century were quite stirred up by a publication of Max Nordau on "Degeneration," in which a number of revered artists and intelligents were held up to public scorn as degenerates and neurasthenics. So wrought up were they, in fact, that Bernard Shaw was moved to compose a defense ent.i.tled "The Sanity of Art." In spite of the Great Vegetarian's dialectics, it remains to be explained why a certain species of creative ability has been combined with the fatigability, variability and general wretched irritability of every organ and tissue in the body which taught them that they were sensitive souls imprisoned in the flesh. Going from doctor to doctor as from pillar to post, from this medical creed to that hygienic cult, lucky to escape the worst, often landing upon the bosom of New Thought for succor. We have noted in previous chapters the relation of neurasthenia to the glands of internal secretion in general, and to adrenal insufficiency in particular. A closer examination of neurasthenic genius will show it to consist essentially of a pituitocentric in whom for one reason or another, congenital (the persistence of the thymus) or acquired (shocks, accidents, diseases) there has been failure of the adrenals, thyroid or the interst.i.tial cells, about in the order of their occurrence.

THE CASE OF NIETZSCHE

Friedrich Nietzsche is about as good a case as there is on record of a genius blasted by migraine. The originality and force of his mind, as well as the articulate music of an imaginative poet, places Nietzsche among the philosophic elect of the race. Showing that he was an unstable pituitary-centered of a certain type will throw light upon his malady, as well as upon his life and work.

In a set of volumes, ent.i.tled Biographic Clinics, Dr. George M. Gould of Philadelphia contended that the ill health of a number of men and women of genius of the nineteenth century was due to unconnected eye troubles. In attempting to bolster up his thesis he has collected biographic material useful to the student of personality. He never appears to have asked himself what was behind the eye trouble. The evidence relating to Nietzsche's endocrine personality is derived from some of the data he collected, as well as from the two volume life of the philosopher written by his sister, and the other biographies of him extant.

To reconstruct the endocrine formula or equation of Nietzsche inductively, one should a.n.a.lyze first the information available concerning his parents and relatives. His grandfather was a conservative bourgeois of a superior type, who was the author of treatises designed to narcotize the forces of rebellion of his time.

What he was like physically, no epitaph declares. His father was a clergyman. A description of him reads ... "tall and slender, with a n.o.ble and poetic personality, and a peculiar talent for music ...

short-sighted." That ranks him at once as a pituito-centric.

The mother was dark and had a fiery temper and came of a family distinguished for the powerfully built anatomy of its members. In the heredity of Nietzsche, the father appears therefore to supply a pituitary predominating element, the mother an adrenal-pituitary predominating element.

Nietzsche himself worked strenuously at the intellectual life (after 20, when he probably stopped growing, and the brain tonic action of the ante-pituitary could manifest itself). Early distinction rewarded him with a professorship in philology at 24. One of Prussia's wars of conquest entangled him, and presented him with diphtheria. A friendship with Richard Wagner marked the turning point of his life, and the point of departure for his works on the most fundamental values of human life. Meanwhile, attacks of sick-headache of varying degrees of severity made him miserable periodically--they came about every two weeks and lasted two to three days--and left him wretched and exhausted. At last, at 44, a species of stroke terminated his sufferings, causing him to lose his speech and memory, and thenceforth there was progressive deterioration, physical and spiritual, with repeated attacks.

In the sister's biography there are several good photographs and reproductions of sculptures of Nietzsche at different ages. An examination of the frontispiece picture, which shows him in profile (profile views are the best for physiognomy), as well as of the bust of Nietzsche by Donndorf, exhibit the most striking traits of the head. To the student of internal secretions, the most prominent feature of the face, emphasized by both the camera and the artist, is the remarkable prominence of the supra-orbital arches, the bony protuberances from which the eyebrows spring. This is a definite pituitary character. The eyebrows themselves are luxurious and slope to meet, the bony development of the face as a whole is sharp and clean-cut, the skull tends to be long and narrow and the chin is square. All these point to a pituitary-centered personality. It is to be regretted that we have no picture or record of Nietzsche caught smiling, which would have preserved the state of his teeth for us. At any rate, considered as checks to my interpretation, his physiognomy and physique, the nature of his genius and the attacks which finally ruined his life, all fit into the conception of him as one whose life centered, like Napoleon's, around what was happening in his sella turcica.

The attacks of sick-headache, diagnosable symptomatically as migraine, were so devastating that in 1883, after the printing of his masterpiece, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," he wrote "My life has been a complete failure." Extracts from his letters, collected by Gould, provide some idea of his suffering. In 1888, just before his stroke, he said, "I have in my eyes a dynamometer of my entire condition."

The history of Nietzsche's eye trouble makes it probable that not simply a defect in his eyes themselves, but a deeper condition behind them was responsible. Up to the age of 15 he was a model scholar.

Essential eye defects of refraction should make themselves felt during childhood. Then, with adolescence, he changed. Adolescence is one of the red-letter epochs for the pituitary, when its growth and enlargement precedes and stimulates the ripening of the s.e.x cells in the reproductive organs. Until adolescence ended and physical development ceased, his intellectual interests were nil, and he was particularly backward in mathematics. Colds and coughs, and recurring pains in the head and eyes bothered him (colds and coughs are frequent in those whose pituitary expansion is limited by the bony sella turcica to any extent). After his p.u.b.erty, migraine definitely became his demon companion. Following the diphtheria in the army (which must have damaged his adrenals), the attacks grew much worse, and complaints about them more bitter because the pituitary now, in addition to its own burden, had to compensate for the insufficient adrenals. So "his frequent illness made him more and more a subject of treatment and commiseration.... If only my eyes would hold out ...

it seems to me at the age of 30 as if I had lived 60 years ... very frequent sufferings of stomach, head and eyes ... acidity oppresses me, and everything except the tenderest food becomes acid.... I cannot doubt that I am the victim of a serious cerebral disease, and that stomach and eyes suffer only from this central cause ... half-dead with pain and exhaustion." In December 1888, he fell, had to be helped home, lay silent for two days, then became loud, active and unbalanced. The attack was preceded by the drinking of much water.

The specific quality of the Nietzsche genius also directs attention to a pituitocentric, to a pituitocentric in whom both ante-pituitary and post-pituitary are extraordinarily well-functioning, but are in a state of unbalance in which the post-pituitary gets the upper hand.

Now, as we have seen, the post-pituitary makes for that instability of a.s.sociation between the brain cells which must be at the bottom of originality and creative thought, as well as of phobias, obsessions, hysterias and hallucinations. Persons in whom the post-pituitary predominates have a lively fancy and are liable to suffer from the tricks of a.s.sociation. Nietzsche, as we have noted, was poor in mathematics and in the calm cool proportioned forward march of scientific thought in general. His most brilliant ideas came to him in flashes and gleams. That is why so much of his work has come down to us in the form of aphorisms and paragraphs. He was, essentially, a poet among the metaphysicians, which again favors the conception of him as a pituitary-centered with a dominant post-pituitary. Yet his incisive critical faculty, as well as his love of music, also doc.u.ment the supernormal ante-pituitary.

To sum up, the physique and physiognomy of Nietzsche, his migraine attacks and the later fate which overtook him, his likes and dislikes, his tastes, abilities and accomplishments followed from his composition as one pituitary-centered, with post-pituitary domination, a superior thyroid, and inferior adrenals.

DARWIN AS A NEURASTHENIC GENIUS

Charles Darwin, as the author of the "Origin of Species" and the greatest revolutionist of the nineteenth century, has naturally had a great deal of attention paid to his life and personality. Yet not until the publication of his Autobiography and his son's Reminiscences was it generally known that he suffered from chronic ill health for most of his adult life. Dr. W.A. Johnston, in an article in the _American Anthropologist_, 1901, has marshalled a number of available facts, to sustain his thesis that Darwin was a victim of neurasthenia.

Now neurasthenia, it is now accepted, is simply a waste-basket word, corresponding to the cla.s.s miscellaneous in a cla.s.sification of any group of real objects. And, as has been emphasized in preceding chapters, most neurasthenia rises upon a disturbed endocrine foundation, most often, an insufficiency of the adrenals. That is, a defect in the chain of co-operation, balance and compensation among the internal secretions is the basis for the weakness of the nervous system the term neurasthenia is supposed to explain, actually only names. Darwin's case was pretty certainly that.

There can be no doubt that Darwin had an abnormal fatigability, a lack of stamina and endurance in mental as well as physical application which plagued him from the late twenties to the sixties. As a child, he was strong and healthy, fond of outdoors, and though underrated by his teachers, noted to be possessed of intense curiosity, especially concerning natural objects. At school he was a fleet runner and cultivated a habit of long walks. Then he was surely no neurasthenic.

Three years which, he himself afterwards said, were worse than wasted, at Cambridge, were filled with shooting, riding and hunting. His good health lasted until the time he probably stopped growing at 21 or 22.

Thereafter his troubles began.

What was Darwin, so far as his endocrine composition was concerned?

In the first place his father was a variety of pituitocentric, of the post-pituitary inferior type, six feet two inches tall, exceedingly corpulent, and, in the eyes of his son, the sharpest of observers and the most sympathetic of men. He wished to make a physician out of his son in order to carry on the medical tradition of the family: Erasmus Darwin was a physician before him. His son, however, showed no inclination for so learned and confining a profession and had to be reproached by his father in these immortal words: "You care for nothing but shooting dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."

Cambridge came after Edinburgh, as he was rushed from medicine into the clergy. But in vain. A friendship struck up with a naturalist, Henslow, settled his career for him. Henslow heard of a trip of general exploration the ship _Beagle_ was to take and recommended Darwin as naturalist. The captain at first would not hear of the proposal because of Darwin's nose, a typical pituitary proboscis. But his prejudices were overcome, and Darwin sailed.

It was upon this voyage that Darwin made himself the greatest naturalist of all time, and at the same time infected himself with the virus of neurasthenia. At Plymouth, while waiting for the ship to sail, he complained of palpitation and pain about the heart, probably due to a transient hyperthyroidism, brought on by excitement. During the voyage, which lasted five years, he was afflicted often by sea-sickness. A ship-mate relates that after spending an hour with the microscope he would say "Old Fellow, I must take the horizontal for it" and lie down. He would stretch out on one side of the table, then resume his labors for a while when he again had to lie down. Already fatigability had to be fed with rest. A serious illness that Darwin claimed affected every secretion of his body acted probably as the exhausting drain upon his adrenal potential.

The return to England was the date of onset for a record of continuous illness, aggravated by his marriage, apparently, for his misery increased progressively after it. So much so that he was forced to leave London altogether so as to avoid the strain of social life, even that of meeting his scientific friends or attending scientific society meetings fatiguing him to exhaustion. After such occasions there would be attacks of violent shivering, with vomiting and giddiness. It was necessary for him to impose upon himself an absolute regime of daily routine. Any interference with it upset him completely, and made it impossible for him to do any work. Early morning was the only time for physical as we; as mental exertion. Evening found him thoroughly used up, with every move an effort. Insomnia made him its prey. A curious sensitiveness to heat and cold distressed him. In 1859, when the "Origin of Species" appeared, he wrote to a friend that his health had quite failed, and that indigestion, headaches, with a looming hopeless breakdown of body and mind made his life a burden and a curse. The twenty years of research he devoted to the problems of evolution were one long torture. For sixteen more years, during which he worked upon and produced immortal cla.s.sics of biology, he was the most wretched and unhappy sufferer from neurasthenia. His life was a continuous alternation of small doses of work and large doses of rest. So he was enabled to publish twenty-three volumes of original writing and fifty-one scientific papers. Living a sort of quasi-sanitarium life, with the rules and regulations of one undergoing a rest cure for thirty-six years, he thus accomplished infinitely more than the millions who have led the strenuous life. That he thus survived, as a genius, among the perils of an intellectual nature in an environment for which his adrenals sentenced him to destruction, must be put down in large measure to the ministrations and good sense of wife and children who supplied him with the endocrine energy he lacked. All these details I have given in the attempt to a.n.a.lyze the internal secretion const.i.tution of this great man of genius, to establish that he really suffered from inadequate function of his adrenal glands, for the symptoms of chronic though benign adrenal insufficiency coincide in their ma.s.s effect with the story of his life. He was not a good animal, as Herbert Spencer declared was a first sine qua non of the successful life. He was a poor animal, the poorest of animals, because he possessed poor adrenals. What saved him was his congenitally superior pituitary (the nidus of genius) and the overacting thyroid, which combined to compensate to some extent for his fundamental lack.

According to his son he rose early because he could not lie in bed, and he would have liked to get up earlier than he did.