The Glands Regulating Personality Part 24

Fatigue as an endocrine deficiency--a depressed state of one or more of the glands of internal secretion, abolished when its normal functioning is restored--is a general principle from which departures of exploration of sub-problems will proceed. An endocrine organ will secrete at a certain rate. When it is stimulated excessively, it will eject extra amounts of its secretion. How long the period of excessive stimulation may last must depend upon the secretion potential or margin of reserve of the cells, varying from organ to organ, and from individual to individual. After that, exhaustion and failure follows, with the onset of the symptoms of fatigue.

A pretty demonstration of this process has been worked out in the electrical stimulation of muscle. If a muscle, say the biceps, is irritated by an electric current, it will contract. As the strength of the current is increased, the degree of contraction becomes greater.

A sort of stepladder effect of increasing contractions may be thus obtained. After a time, the electric shocks cannot cause a greater contraction, but only a lesser. And if continued, the muscle will cease to function because of fatigue. If now, when the muscle begins to lag in its response, and its contractions to decrease, one injects into a vein extracts of thyroid, parathyroid, or adrenal glands, they will immediately reinvigorate the failing contractions. The injections must be made before the fatigue is carried to the point of absolute exhaustion. It follows that these glands normally pour into the circulation substances which counteract the effect of fatigue substances, and in fact make possible muscular recuperation from fatigue throughout the day as well as in emergencies and crises.

Fatigue, conventionally recognized, is something acute and urgent. As such it means a violent draining of the endocrine wells. But there is also a chronic fatigue, which has been dignified with the name of Fatigue Disease. Bernard Shaw once asked for someone to tell him the name of the germ causing the symptoms of overwork. That being impossible, he will have to be satisfied with the answer that it is not a germ, but an internal secretion, or rather a defect of internal secretion that is the cause.

Whether or not the adrenals have been damaged by past experiences, and upon their capacity to respond to the necessities of an occasion, fatigue reactions primarily depend. A quotation from Sir James MacKenzie, most distinguished of modern English students of medicine, summarizes the matter neatly. "Abelous, and Langlois and Albanese have studied the relation of the adrenal bodies to fatigue.... They infer that the muscular weakness following removal of the adrenals is due to toxic substances. In view of our present knowledge of the physiological action of adrenaline in its various forms, it seems more probable that the weakness is to be explained by the absence of the normal tone producing internal secretions of the bodies in question."

In other words, the adrenals regulate muscle tone. They produce nature's tonics for weary tissues. The chronic la.s.situde of thousands of our generation, suffering from "that tired feeling," may be put down to chronic adrenal insufficiency.

It requires no superlative imagination to see that an adrenal poor subject does not belong upon a job that involves muscle stress over a long period, or indeed fatiguing conditions of any sort. Nor that a thyroid poor individual is not the best choice for a position that demands a keen, alert body and mind. In the selection of executives, the nature and stamina of the pituitary will undoubtedly be taken very seriously in the near future.

A certain hocus-pocus concerning character reading, a perverted revival of the ancient phrenology and physiognomy, has invaded the employment territory in America as the newest charlatanism. The study of the internal secretions, including blood and X-ray examinations, will surely a.s.sist the demand for a truly scientific estimate of const.i.tution and character that can be relied upon in the cla.s.sification and distribution of personnel.

THE PROSPECTS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH

By their effects upon the endocrines, public health influences like food, clothing, sleep and overpressure and last but not least, _disease_, the so-called diseases of childhood, possess a tremendous importance in limiting the output of the educable. They act to subtract from and so to lower the rating, the capacity of the germ-plasm. Most material and vital of these influences are the common diseases of children, for they strike directly at the glands of internal secretion.

Measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps, and the others have long been accepted as providential visitations for sins known or unknown.

That children had to have them and were better off when they had them has become part of the tradition of the laity, fostered by the lazy ignorance of previous medical generations. But today we are beginning to ask ourselves why children must have these endemic infections of their age. The pathologist goes farther and asks the reason for certain apparent immunities. He asks why the little boy who sleeps with his brother sick with scarlet fever does not contract the disease, even though not protected by a previous attack.

Determining why susceptibility to a special disease in a particular case exists will const.i.tute the greatest line of advance for the understanding and prevention of disease, and so the perfection of public health. In the last influenza epidemic countless physicians were puzzled by the spectacle of men and women in the pink of condition carried off in twenty-four hours while puny a.s.sociates were either pa.s.sed over, or pooh-poohed their colds. Pathologists have spent their energies fruitfully upon the infectious causes of disease, the microbes and parasites especially. But now, having solved most of those problems, the vital question of why an organism permits itself to be attacked is pus.h.i.+ng itself to the front. Why a peculiar ailment selects its victim, why the bacillus finds a fertile soil, is the neglected problem, which must be solved before the abolition of disease and its carriers will be remotely conceivable.

Long ago, Hippocrates, revered founder of the art of medicine, recognized that there was a specific affinity of disease for individuals with more or less the same characteristic somatic and psychic traits and trends. Tuberculosis, for instance, was noted for its frequency in long-skeletoned, thin persons, remarkably optimistic.

And the plethoric, choleric nature of the sufferer from gout has become proverbial. Before the era of the great bacteriologic discoveries of the eighties and nineties, the concordance of esoteric racial and personal markings was a great help in diagnosis to the physician. For he realized, though he sometimes credited it to his clinical intuition, that it was a certain type of personality that was liable to the specific disease.

But personality and its reactions, normal and abnormal, are determined by the endocrines. So we should find that particular infections run with special internal glandular predominances. For the picture presented by an infection, temperature, rash, prostration, are the details of the general reaction of the organism in the face of a new situation, the presence of a powerful, destructive invader.

Information has acc.u.mulated that the invader is powerful and destructive, as well as selective, because of endocrine deficiency of one sort or another in the body it has attacked. Work of a number of investigators has indicated that an individual's susceptibility or its reverse, resistance, is intimately subjected to the derangements or harmonies of the endocrine system.

Comparison of the endocrine type and the disease a.s.saulting has yielded an even more interesting principle. Knowing the state of the internal secretion reservoirs enables us to predict the liability to certain of these infections of childhood. Diphtheria has been found to occur most virulently among adrenal poor individuals. Moreover, they are left poorer in adrenal afterwards. It follows that they would be a.s.sisted by the feeding of adrenal. Mumps is a sickness that sometimes permanently injures the gonads: the testes or ovaries. The thyroid dominant, whose system is rich in thyroid, will rarely suffer from any of the common diseases of children--if at all, from measles. Op the other hand, those who have every infection of the period, and who, as their mothers say, seem to get everything, are those whose system is thyroid poor. Thyroid poverty is a splendid enticement to the universal microbe. The thymocentric stands all diseases poorly. The pituitary type is more liable to epidemic meningitis and infantile paralysis, typhoid and scarlet fever.

The public health officer of the future will be armed with a new weapon in his fight against the spread of an epidemic. He will be able to cla.s.sify the endocrine traits of the population exposed, and to advise a course of glandular feeding for the types specially liable.

The Schick test for diphtheria susceptibility is an ill.u.s.tration of one method of approach to the problem of the epidemiologist in settling who needs protection. The endocrines will a.s.sist him in the great body of diseases for which no immunity test is at hand. Should another influenza epidemic come along, for instance, the proper handling, from the endocrine standpoint, of the thymocentrics and the related adrenocentrics would help considerably in lowering the mortality.

Endocrine types have other tendencies, which when studied and controlled, will decimate the great a.s.sa.s.sins of middle age: heart disease and kidney disease, with accompanying degenerations of the blood vessels and circulation. The adrenocentric tends to get up a hyperacidity of the stomach and a high blood pressure, besides certain forms of diseases of the lungs. The thyrocentric is predisposed to heart disease, as well as intestinal disturbances. The pituitocentric is liable to periodic and cyclic upsets in his health.

Narcotism, the craving for narcotic or stimulant drugs, and its subvariety, alcoholism, has been found most often among the thymocentrics. Any type of endocrine inferiority, interfering with success in life, may lead to the habit of drug addiction as one way out. But the blood and tissues of the thymocentric appear to become habituated to the narcotic stimulant more easily than the other types, and so to demand it with a physical imperative comparable to the food or s.e.x urge. Among artists, philosophers and statesmen, on the other hand, actively productive and so contrasted with criminals and degenerates drug addiction has frequently been a mode of endocrine compensation. That is, the drug produced temporarily the effects of the internal secretion lacking or insufficient. Thus the effects of cocaine may be compared with the effects of thyroid. But while there is a normal mechanism for thyroid detoxication, the cocaine or heroin derivatives mark the tissues permanently with their scars and deform the personality.

THE HYGIENE OF THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS

All these protean expressions of endocrine determination may now begin to be looked upon with the hopeful and optimistic att.i.tude of him who understands cause and effect and can control. The advances made in the last ten years in the practical manipulation of the ductless glands from without, the introduction of glandular extracts by feeding or injection, and the modification of their structure and function by surgery, the X-ray and radium, and other procedures, enable us to regard more confidently the problems. .h.i.therto accepted as the insoluble and intricate handiwork of Fate. Fate may have woven the patterns of our being. But as we commence to probe the machinery and to examine the looms more carefully, we begin to understand why the wheels creak, and why there are seconds and odd lots in the product as well as the rare and precious firsts. Moreover, we are learning how to handle the machinery ourselves. The abdication of Fate can therefore be confidently expected in due time.

However, we have yet to begin, and we can begin with prevention. The theory of Adler, that some organ inferiority is responsible for much unhappiness in life has received much advertis.e.m.e.nt in conjunction with the doctrines of the Freudians. It is a theory of little scope when applied to the eyes, ears, heart and so on because only a small minority of the cases are of that kind. But as we have seen, a deficiency of an internal secretion, an endocrine inferiority, reverberates throughout all the cells. Not only the mind, but all of the members of the organism must strain and co-operate to make up for the break in the balance.

Endocrine inferiority is indeed the most frequent organic inferiority.

And we may explain a number of mental types upon that basis. Thus the inferior gonado-centric, who has something wrong with his reproductive organs, will evolve in one of two directions. If his adrenal and thyroid are of poor quality, he will become the secluded introvert, shut off from the interests of normal life. He will enter the borderland of insanity if pituitary difficulties supervenes. If, on the contrary, the adrenal, thyroid and pituitary are present in a certain proportion, he will become the active, aggressive, never-resting, keen, and relentless fanatic reformer. A woman who is gonad deficient with a superior adrenal will suffer from virilism and specialize in the extreme tactics and mythology of the feminist movement. A number of life reactions are cla.s.sifiable as the strivings of endocrine inferior individuals to overcome their sense of inferiority. The unconscious vegetative system and the system of consciousness are both modified by the weakness of a link in the glandular chain.

What, therefore, is to be recommended in the prophylaxis of the natural deterioration of the wells of life, the ductless glands? For even if we may be able to replenish them when they dry up, would it not be better to delay their dessication? The hormones reply to every call of life and respond in every reaction. The normal constructive process of their cells remanufactures what has been lost, and the original capacity to respond is restored. If, though, the rate of destruction and loss outruns the rate of repair and construction, they will be permanently damaged. This is what occurs in shock, serious, severe accidents and injuries, prolonged infections and diseases, profound continued emotions, and the wear and tear of overwork. The prevention of these excessive fatigues of the endocrine system in one or all of its parts, and especially the prevention and enfeeblement of the diseases of children which injure them at a period when they are most sensitive to injury, is the task of the endocrine hygienist.

Periodic examinations, to check up the balance sheets of the hormone factories and to measure the amount of their damage by means of blood a.n.a.lyses, will provide the most valuable method in the campaign to lengthen the productive and enjoying span of life.

THE TREATMENT OF CRIME

Endocrine hygiene will discover no wider or more fruitful area for exploration and control than that of crime. For more than a generation there have been attempts at a criminology, and a new understanding and control of crime. In the United States a concomitant sentimentalism has concocted measures like the honor system which, naturally failing of their purpose, have undermined confidence in the idea of scientific diagnosis and treatment of crime. As someone has noted, to ask a criminal to promise not to misbehave, when discharged from prison, is like asking a typhoid fever patient to promise not to have a temperature above ninety-nine degrees the next morning. For a large proportion of criminals--the percentage has yet to be determined, although the most recent police commissioner of Chicago has estimated it at ninety per cent--punishment for a period of time and then letting him go free is like imprisoning a diphtheria carrier for a while and then permitting him to commingle with his fellows and spread the germ of diphtheria.

Of course, the doctrine of responsibility is all tangled up with our att.i.tude towards and treatment of crime. Though clear thought makes mandatory the recognition of a universal cause and effect law, practical common sense has defined free will. Consent or the withholding of consent to a given course of action has been the criterion of responsibility.

In practice, the limitation of responsibility will depend upon the insertion of extraneous factors into the formula of consent. The pragmatic test has been and will be the probability that the correction of the somatic or psychic condition would have prevented or will prevent the consent to the crime. As long as no such condition will be demonstrable, society for its own protection will have to confine the unfortunate individual.

The character of the confinement, its duration, and the uses to which it will be put should be dominated by the idea of discovering the unknown criminal predisposition. If crime is an abnormality scientifically studiable and controllable like measles, court procedure and prison management will have to be transformed radically.

There is scattered throughout the world now a group of people who are applying medical methods to the diagnosis and treatment of crime. They are the pioneers who will be remembered in history as the compeers of those who transformed the att.i.tudes toward insanity and its therapy.

The insane were once condemned and handled as criminals are in most civilized countries yet. The criminologic laboratory as an adjunct to the court of justice, like that a.s.sociated with the court of Chief Justice Olson in Chicago, remains to be universalized. What contribution to a more rational treatment of the criminal will the study of the internal secretions make?

It has been shown that the greater number of convicts are mentally and morally subnormal. To explain the subnormality, the criminologist has conducted and will continue to conduct investigations into the heredity and early environment of the criminal, his education and occupation, the social and religious influences to which he was subjected, and the intelligence test quotient. The conditioning of the vegetative system and the endocrine status of the prisoner, however, will without a doubt come to occupy the leading positions in any interpretation of crime in the future.

Introspective observation of pre-criminal states of mind by so-called normal persons reveals that in many of them there is an impairment of reason and will power, in others an exaltation amounting almost to hysteria. What are these but endocrine states of the cells, experimentally reproducible by increasing or decreasing the influence of the thyroid, the adrenals, the pituitary? Crimes of pa.s.sion may be traced in no small part to disturbances of the thyroid. A psychologic examiner of a Pittsburgh court, interested in the subject, has found an enlarged thyroid in over ninety per cent of delinquent girls.

Similarly, crimes of violence may be ascribed to a profound break in the adrenal equilibrium. Criminal tendencies in women during menstruation and pregnancy, periods of deep-seated mutation in the internal glandular system, have long been noted. A kleptomania, uncontrollable desire to steal, confined to the duration of pregnancy alone, has been described. We have seen how the thymocentric, especially if he possesses a small bony case for his pituitary, is predisposed to crime. A recent study of twenty murderers in the State of West Virginia showed them all to have a persistent thymus and the thymocentric const.i.tution. A study of the recidivists, those who return for second and third offences, in one inst.i.tution, disclosed that a large majority had a subnormal temperature and an increased heart and breathing rate. These are endocrine-controlled functions.

Conduct, normal or abnormal, being the resultant of the conflict of conscious and subconscious impulses and inhibitions, the internal secretions as controllers of the susceptibility of the brain cells to impulses and inhibitions, must be held accountable for a portion at least of the chemical reactions behind crime.

It is possible, by X-ray treatment of the thymus, to cause it to shrink to more normal proportions. It is possible, by feeding various glandular extracts, to correct deficiencies or excesses of their function, and so to remedy the underlying basis for a criminal career.

Here and there work of this kind has been successfully carried out in selected instances. What a suitable drive upon the whole matter would yield in happiness to the individual and dollars and cents to society, time alone will show.

CHAPTER XIII

THE EFFECT UPON HUMAN EVOLUTION

The ubiquitous and deep-seated influence of the internal secretions upon life and personality comprises but a fraction of what is known, and only a hint of what is to become known. There is an endocrine aspect to every human being and every human activity, normal and abnormal, internal process and its external expression, regulated by laws of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse. Their control promises us now a dominion over the most intimate and inaccessible recesses of our lives in a way comparable only to the control we now exercise over the forces and energies once revered as the instruments of the G.o.ds--light, heat, magnetism, electricity. We have learned how to control and change our environment. We are now learning, endocrine research is now discovering, how to control and change ourselves.

The story of the evolution of the two types of control has many a.n.a.logies. When man ceased looking upon his surroundings as inhabited by spirits of good and evil, as he conceived himself, and discovered that they were composed of things malleable and a.n.a.lysable in his hands, he became their master. When now he drops the old superst.i.tions about himself as a spirit, an emulsion of a spirit of good and spirit of evil, and sees himself more and more clearly as the most complex of chemical reactions, regulated and determined as are the simple and complex chemical reactions around him, he will begin to rule and modify himself as he rules and modifies them. Whether or not he will ultimately come to this final lucidity of thought and action, it behooves us to consider some of the uses to which our present knowledge might be put.

Since every step of the daily routine or adventure, from waking to sleeping, eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, working, idling, fighting, playing, feeling, enjoying, sorrowing, every shade of emotion and nuance of mood, in short every phase of happiness and unhappiness, are endocrine episodes in the life history of the individual, the sphere of applications is as long and broad and deep as life itself. Not only do the internal secretions open up before us the great hope--that Life at last will cease to stumble and grope and blunder, manacled by the iron chains of inexorable cause and effect.

They provide tools, concrete and measurable, that can be handled and moved, weighed and seen, for the management of the problems of human nature and evolution.

Every department of human life, the questions of labor and industry, science and art, education, puericulture, international problems, crime and disease, may be illuminated. War and s.e.x, those two master interests of mankind, may be understood and handled sympathetically as they have never before. The reactions of man alone, and man in the crowd, will be clarified. The red thread of individuality which runs through the woof and warp of all human affairs will be unraveled.

Inevitably, customs, morals, codes of procedure and practice, inst.i.tutions, all those expressions of opinion which make conduct, all the currents which contrive the infinite variety of life, will be transmitted into another set of values.

A remoulding, a remodeling will take place all along the line.

Manifestly an unstable thymocentric should not be treated as a criminal, but treated in a sanitarium. A masculinoid woman needs satisfactions not vouchsafed in the old "love, honor and obey" home.

How absurd it is to found codes of morality upon sermons or even the latest psychologies. During the nineteenth century progress in physics and mechanics overturned traditions thousands of years had painfully toiled to erect. What is to happen when man comes at last to experiment upon himself like a G.o.d, dealing not only with the materials without, but also with the very const.i.tuents of his innermost being? Will he not then indeed become a G.o.d? If he does not destroy himself before, that is surely his destiny. For better or for worse, we possess now in the endocrines new instruments for swaying the individual as individual, and as related to other individuals, as a member of a type, family, nation, species and genus.

THE BASIS OF VARIATION

The sense of likeness and the sense of unlikeness plays a decisive role in the diurnal schedule of the individual. His sense of resemblance to his father and mother, his kin and clan, mark him and them off against the cosmos as an alliance of defense and offense. Yet no matter how closely he is like them and they like him, he differs and varies, they differ and vary, with a sort of mutual forgiveness, because the amount of resemblance overtops the degree of variation. In a paper on the "Rediscovery of the Unique," H.G. Wells emphasized the unique quality of the individual, and how, in spite of the cleverest devices of cla.s.sification, living things ultimately escaped the cla.s.sifying net by virtue of their tendency forever to vary.

The individual is unique. Yet when all is said and done, the fact remains that between individuals there is resemblance, and among them variation. What is the reason for their resemblances and what is the cause of their variation?