SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES
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 illustrations of their power and influence. What is the
evidence that, as Huxley anticipated, "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 classed 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
sexual life, his libido, was abnormal. Curiously explosive in their
appearance and manifestations were his sexual 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.'
Sexual 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 sexual
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 constitution. 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 pronounced 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.
Constitutional 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 sexual 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 classing 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 succumbed 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 sexual desire, and the chastity 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 associates 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 illustration 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 associated with their
extraordinary ability, they attracted an attention that concerned
itself not at all with the circumstance 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 accumulated 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 association 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, document 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 assuming 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 siècle 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 entitled "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 interstitial
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, entitled 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 analyze 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
noble 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 sex 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 puberty, 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 association 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 association. 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 document
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 class miscellaneous in a classification 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 régime 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 classics 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 analyze the internal
secretion constitution 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 mass 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.
What other hints have we that in spite of his fatigue disease he was
a pituitocentric? The record of his physique and physiognomy,
documentary and that left in portraits and photographs. He was tall
and thin and his frame was naturally strong and large. Face was ruddy,
and his grey eyes looked out from under deep overhanging brows and
bushy eyebrows. The ears were large and prominent, the hair straight,
the nose broad and well developed. All these are distinctive pituitary
traits. The photograph of him taken by Maull and Fox in 1854 shows his
chin to be the square firm kind that goes with the ante-pituitary type
physique. (This photo is the frontispiece of the collection of essays
entitled "Darwinism and Modern Science," edited by A.C. Seward and
published in 1909). Charles Darwin, we may say, then, lived the
life of one with a hyperfunctioning pituitary, the anterior portion
dominating the posterior, a thyroid excess, and an adrenal much
deficient, the combination settling the fate of a grand intellect
in an invalid. It is interesting to note that an extant portrait
of Erasmus Darwin, Darwin's distinguished grandfather, shows a
pituitocentric, but with a rounder head and a fatter face, which point
to a predominance of the post-pituitary over the ante-pituitary.
Correspondingly, he was more speculative and poetic intellectually
than his grandson, and more irascible and imperious in his moods.
After 1872, when Charles Darwin was sixty-three years old, a marked
change for the better occurred in his health. For the last ten years
of his life the condition of his health was a cause of satisfaction
and hope to his family. "He was able to work more steadily with less
fatigue and distress afterwards." This is probably to be explained as
following the gonadopause hi him--the cessation of activity of the
interstitial cells. After this event, the adrenals in the male nearly
always function more efficiently, and well being is improved even
though the blood pressure often rises coincidently. In the relative
vigor of that decade we have another bit of evidence that the adrenals
had much to say over Darwin's life.
EPILEPTIC GENIUS
He had a fever when he was in Spain
And, when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake: 'tis true, this god did shake
His coward lips did from their color fly;
And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world,
Did lose his lustre: I did hear him groan.
--Julius Caesar.
Epilepsy, the "falling sickness" or "fits," is generally associated
with a deterioration or degeneration of mentality, and an inferior
personality is frequently an ingredient. Progressively increasing data
accumulate to incriminate more and more a disturbance of the endocrine
balance, on the side of multiple deficiencies, as the basic mechanism
at the bottom of a good many of them. Concurrent studies reveal that
abnormalities of the thyroid, the parathyroids, the ovaries and
testes, and even the thymus exist behind the attack. Investigation of
the content of the consciousness of the different kinds of epilepsies
from this point of view will doubtless bring to light some interesting
information. There is much to be done for the epileptic with this new
method of approach.
Epilepsy, just the same, may occur in men gifted with the sort of
transcendent ability called genius. Mohammed, Lord Byron, Dostoyevsky,
Flaubert, to name a few cases, are famous instances. The point to be
settled is whether epileptic genius, that is epilepsy with superior
ability, occurs most often in pituitocentrics, the epilepsy being
symptomatic of a pituitary struggling against barriers, tugging
against bonds. As mentioned, in such cases epilepsy appears as the
twin brother of migraine in genius. Should that be established,
we should have more evidence for the pituitary dominance of most
specimens of intellectual power. As a case in point let us take the
most famous of the epileptic geniuses--Julius Caesar, "When the fit
was on I marked how he did shake; tis true, this god did shake."
According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar was of slender build,
fair-complexioned, pale, emaciated, of a delicate constitution
(reminding us of Darwin), subject to severe headache and violent
attacks of epilepsy. In view of the work of Cushing, the concurrence
of "severe headache and violent attacks of epilepsy" is sharply
suggestive of a pituitary origin for both. In his seventeenth year
he was already engaged to be married, which proves his precocity. An
overactive, erratic pituitary could here also be held responsible.
Soon after he was proscribed by the dictator Sulla, and the first of
a series of epileptic convulsions is recorded. Shock tries the
pituitary, as well as the adrenals.
His sexual libido was of the quality that stimulated his soldiers to
sing celebrations of his exploits. The first woman he was engaged to
be jilted. Cornelia, his first wife, he divorced on the ground that
"Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." Matrimony committed twice
thereafter landing him in the divorce court, he devoted himself to
liaisons, one with Cleopatra. This sexual hyperactivity was probably
another pituitary trait.
The compound of intellectual and practical ability he realized was
of the rarest. It meant a most delicate balance between his
ante-pituitary, post-pituitary, adrenals and thyroid. He was an
orator, politician, historian, conqueror, and statesman. That his
thyroid functioned well can be deduced from a career which involved
more than three hundred personal triumphs as recognition from his
native city. On horseback, riding without using his hands, he would
often dictate to two or three secretaries at once. The masculine love
of glory and ambition, expression of a well-working ante-pituitary,
was combined with the effeminate echoes of an equally well-evolved
post-pituitary. No prima donna was more concerned with the care of
her skin, complexion and hair than he. The analogy extends even to
superfluous hair which he had removed, not by the modern electrolysis,
but by depilation with forceps and main force. The attendants at
his bath would polish his epidermis, for his satisfaction, until it
resembled alabaster or marble.
Caesar was not the kind of great man that Darwin was, and only
a rather muddled careerist because he had too much adrenal and
post-pituitary. But he was pituitocentric of a certain type. We
possess no authentic portraits or busts of him to go by. But the bust
in the Museum of Naples, for which he probably sat (some, H.G. Wells
among them, will not accept this), presents the sort of face that is
often seen in pituitary epileptics, and the features and skull of a
pituitocentric: long, large, well-modeled head eyebrows prominent,
with tendency to meet, aquiline nose and strong chin.
In these three, Napoleon, Nietzsche and Caesar, we have male
pituitocentrics, exhibiting diversities of life and tastes because of
differences in the co-working endocrine glands in their makeup. We
shall consider now a female pituitocentric who presents the strangest
contrasts in physique, physiognomy, conduct and character, dependent
upon a variation in the balance between the two portions of the
pituitary.
THE LEGEND OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
All biographies consist of prevarications and all autobiographies
of fiction. That summing up of a mass of literature over which
industrious students have ruined their eyes, held good until after the
War, when things changed. Then Mr. Lytton Strachey, at one fell blow,
and with one magnificent masterpiece, hurdled the old idols and
established a new standard of deliberate accuracy in print. In his
"Eminent Victorians" he set the pace for the host of those who have
been stimulated by his good example, like Lady Margot Asquith.
Of the four Victorian respectable worthies Strachey has dissected as
ruthlessly as the anatomist a post-mortem, his portrait of Florence
Nightingale, the founder of the modern science and art of nursing, is
most interesting because it provides data of the utmost value to
the student of the endocrine basis of human personality. In the
conventional two-volume biography of this superwoman, she is pictured
as an intellectual saint, stepped from a stained glass window upon her
wonderful visit to a clay-smeared earth. The biographer, presenting
all the ins and outs of her body and soul as he has, makes her live
before us with a fresh vitality that is startling.
The species of life Florence Nightingale lived, involving as it did
struggle with a masculine world, and conquest of it, implies the
existence in her of certain masculine traits and marks, for the normal
feminine psyche is submissive rather than aggressive toward its
environment, human and otherwise. Belonging to a family in the highest
circles, it was upon the table d'hôte of her destiny that she should
become a regulation debutante, careeristina, and successful wife and
mother. Instead, she chose to question the whole routine of the life
of her class, and in her diary she records her doubts and cravings,
and her revolt against what is assumed by her family and friends to be
the normal course of existence for her. The attitudes and questionings
in these passages, the religious feeling displayed, are distinctly
masculine. Most easily could the following, for instance, pass as
having been written by a man: "I desire for a considerable time only
to lead a life of obscurity and toil, for the purpose of allowing
whatever I may have received of God to ripen, and turning it some day
to the glory of His Name. Nowadays people are too much in a hurry
both to produce and consume themselves. It is only in retirement, in
silence, in meditation that are formed the _men_ who are called to
exercise an influence upon society." In a note-book she puts May 7,
1852, as the date upon which she was conscious of a call from God
to be a saviour. Now the vast majority of women who have remained
spinsters at 32, in spite of considerable personal attractions and
high natural ability, are visited by waves of emotional fervor for a
de-personalization of the self. But in the case of the subject, as
Strachey has so well shown, the call was pursued with a self-willed,
pitiless, unscrupulous determination, worthy of Satan himself upon the
most ferocious evil bent. In its pursuit indeed she became what her
latest biographer has called a "woman possessed by a Demon." All
necessary, not alone because if she had been meek and mild she would
have existed in futility, but because of the high percentage of the
masculine endocrines in her composition. It is most regrettable that
we have no statement of the findings of a gynecologic examination of
her. That she was almost consciously masculine may be inferred not
only from the way she bullied Lord Pannure and worked to death her
dearest friend with the angelic temper, Sidney Herbert, who was so
amiable that he could be driven by one who wrote: "I have done with
being amiable. It is the mother of all mischief." She could also
write, "I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an
excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and _other men_.
When a disaster happens, I act, and they make excuses."
Lytton Strachey has painted superbly all this in his essay. But for us
his most significant passage is the following: "When old age actually
came, something curious happened. Destiny, having waited patiently,
played a queer trick upon Miss Nightingale. The benevolence and public
spirit of that long life had only been equaled by its acerbity. Her
virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured forth her unstinted
usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And now the sacredness
of years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was not to die
as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her: she was to be
made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and complacency. The
change came gradually, but at last it was unmistakable."
"_There appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical mould._
The _thin, angular_ woman, with her haughty eye, and her acrid mouth,
had vanished, and in her place was the _rounded, bulky form_ of a _fat
old lady_, smiling all day long. Then something else became visible.
The brain which had been steeled at Scutari was, indeed,
literally growing soft. Senility--an ever more and more amiable
senility--descended."
We have here an absolutely typical pituitary history, with another
case of pituitocentric natural ability. What happens when pituitary
hyperfunction or superiority becomes underfunction or inferiority is
precisely as Strachey has described so cleverly of the "ministering
angel": the acrid, thin and keen degenerate every time into the
amiable, fat and dull. Just as Napoleon was transformed by the
mutations of his pituitary, so was the Saint with the Lamp. And in
both instances the contrasting modifications, from one extreme of
glandular function to the other, supply us with the clue to the secret
hand of their inner being and becoming, which worked upon the twists
and turns of circumstance about them as a sculptor upon clay.
The official biography by Sir Edward Cook contains three portraits,
representing three different stages, which bear out the pituitocentric
thesis of her personality and life history. One as she was at 25, and
pictured by Mrs. Gaskell: "She is tall; very straight and willowy in
figure; thick and shortish rich brown hair; very delicate complexion
... perfect teeth ... perfect grace and lovely appearance ... she is
so like a saint." The face is long and oval, of the post-pituitary
kind. Then gradually the ante-pituitary gained an ascendency in the
concert of her internal secretions, so coloring her life with its
masculine tints, and altering her face as well as her disposition. The
photograph of her taken when she was 38 shows a quadrangular outline,
and all the acridity that impressed Strachey. The last picture of her,
a water color drawing made in 1907, shows a round visaged old dame,
who might be the peasant grandmother of two dozen descendants. Little
patches of red over the cheek bones remind one of myxedema and
indicate that toward the very end of her life her thyroid failed her
as well as her pituitary. So that our biographer relates: "Then by
Royal Command, the Order of Merit was brought to South Street, and
there was a little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson, after
a short speech, stepped forward and handed the order of the insignia
to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly recognized
that some compliment was being paid her. 'Too kind--too kind!' she
murmured; and she was not ironical." In the days of pituitary and
thyroid hyperfunction we may be sure she would have been caustically
and penetratingly ironical.
THE EXPLANATION OF OSCAR WILDE
The case of Oscar Wilde, as one of the high tragedies of English
Literature and Life, attracted the attention of the whole world in its
heyday, and even today evokes controversy. As a literary figure and
artist, the poet of the Portrait of Dorian Gray, and "De Profundis,"
belongs without a doubt to the immortals. As a convicted criminal, who
served for two years at hard labor in Reading jail, and afterwards,
a prey to chronic alcoholism, died in obscurity in Paris, he still
remains a subject of whispered conversation in private, and his crime
a taboo to the public, mentionable only at the risk of arousing the
terrible odium sexicum of the prurient majority. Oscar Wilde was a
homosexual of a certain type. In view of the previously laid down
considerations concerning the endocrine genesis of homosexuality, how
are we to explain him, and his natural history?
As with the other exemplars of genius examined we need here, too, to
gain some insight into his "internal secretion heredity." His father,
Sir William Wilde, was a surgeon. Photographs of him show the long
and broad face of a pituito-adrenal centered individual, with
a corresponding duplex incarnation in the face, the upper half
strikingly spiritual, the lower curiously animal.
He was active, practical and eminently successful. His wife recalls
Florence Nightingale, in face, figure and conduct (people who are
built alike as regards their internal secretions are those whom we
recognize as similar physically and psychically). She, too, was a
pituito-adrenal, and in so far resembled her husband. But as in a
woman ante-pituitary and adrenal superiority make for masculinity,
she must be classed as a masculinoid type of woman. She was socially
aggressive, and took part in the revolutionary movement of her time in
Ireland. Thus we find that Oscar Wilde was the result of a mating of
internal secretions acting in the same direction. The process might be
compared to parthenogenesis.
It is on record that when enceinte his mother often expressed the
wish that her child be a girl. When a boy was born, she was immensely
disappointed. To compensate for her disappointment, she brought him up
a good deal like a little girl. She had him dressed in girls' clothes
at an age when most boys are violent destroyers of clothing. She would
hang massive jewelry upon him, for the delight of playing with the
resultant stage picture as a satisfaction for her discontented
desires. In the light of modern psychology, and our formulization of
her endocrine status, we must put down her conduct to a suppressed
homosexual craving. Had her son been built along the lines of strong
emphatic masculinity, her influence, though vicious, would probably
have found no congenial soil, and would have died out altogether after
his contacts with the outer world, beginning with school. No matter
how she would have conditioned his vegetative system temporarily,
his internal secretions, released then from compression, would have
asserted themselves and determined his fate differently. However, it
is quite possible that if such had been the case Oscar Wilde, the
aesthete, the paradoxer, the disciple of Walter Pater and Baudelaire,
would have stayed in the land of the to be born. I mean that then
we would not have had Oscar Wilde, but another person, genius or
commonplace, who also might have borne the name of Oscar Wilde.
That was not to be. The singular assortment of endocrines that mingled
their activities to make Oscar Wilde shaped a personality which we
must classify as the thymocentric (thymus-centered). Why this should
be so is an interesting question. Pituito-adrenal plus pituito-adrenal
of his heredity should make two pituito-adrenals according to
elementary arithmetic and the rule of three. A cancellation of the two
factors of the equation rather than addition seems to have occurred.
The result was a persistent thymus superiority, with an instability of
the other two main glands involved.
How do we know that Oscar Wilde was a thymocentric? Because in his
fullest development he exhibited all the earmarks of the thymus
pattern. We possess a number of good pictures and descriptions of him,
as he was really a contemporary, and would probably be alive today
if he had been put in a hospital for proper treatment instead of in
prison. An excellent description is that of Henri de Regnier's: "This
foreigner (Wilde) was _tall_, and of _great corpulence_. A _high_
complexion seemed to give still greater width to his clean shaven
face. It was the _unbearded_ (glabre) face that one sees on coins. The
_hands_ ... were rather _fleshy_ and _plump_." The points of immediate
interest are the height, the complexion and the beardlessness. One
classic variety of the thymocentric is tall, has a baby's skin, and
has little or no hair on the face. A passage from a narrative written
by one of his warders confirms the last condition decidedly. "Before
leaving his cell to see a visitor, he was alway careful to conceal, as
far as possible, his unshaven chin by means of his red handkerchief."
Bristles on the chin, with little or none on the cheeks, is the
inference. It is important to stress the thymocentric significance of
this glabrosity of the face. Another sign to be put in italics was the
quality of his voice. It has been described as a beautiful tenor, when
he had it under perfect control, and high pitched and strident when
under the influence of passion or temper. Such a voice would be the
product of a larynx remaining partly or completely in the infantile
state, as in a woman's. That, and the large breasts he is said to have
had, point again to the thymus-centered constitution. All in
all, there can be no doubt that Oscar Wilde was a case of status
lymphaticus, the technical name for the thymus-centered personality.
As happens in a number of thymocentrics, his pituitary must have
attempted to compensate for the endocrine deficiencies always present
in them. The exceptional size of his head was a pituitary trait.
Finding, possibly making, plenty of room for itself to grow, for some
unknown reason, in an extraordinary fashion, it reinforced the love of
the beautiful that is part of the feminine post-pituitary nature, with
an intellectual ability and maturity that was at first all-conquering.
In the face of a society organized for pure masculine and pure
feminine types, disgrace and disaster at last overtook him with almost
the ruthlessness of natural selection wiping out an unadapted sport
suddenly cropping up in an environment. In prison he suffered from
severe splitting headaches, which were probably due to changes in his
pituitary. Described as being directly over the eyes, they haunted him
until his death, and may have had a good deal to do with the absinthe
addiction he acquired.
THE TREATMENT OF GENIUS
The problem of Oscar Wilde raises an ethical question that still
remains to be finally answered. Granting that all of society should
one day see him and his kind as a peculiar and specific constitutional
product of an odd intermixture of internal secretions, what should
be done with him and them? It is easy to play with words like
"degenerates." But still, we do not condemn imbeciles, idiots or
defectives, or other substandard, subnormal creatures to the prisons.
For the sake of the good opinion society would maintain of itself,
it sends the latter nowadays to hospitals, sanitaria, or their
equivalents, where protection for itself without punishment for them
may be practised. But is confinement, or even treatment the solution?
For we have to consider what society would lose by cutting such
abnormals off from itself, and them from its stimulations. A number
of artists have been built like Oscar Wilde, musicians in particular.
Without them, would there not be a great gap, a yawning absence, in
the world's culture?
Modern diagnosis and modern therapy might have done a great deal for
Napoleon, Nietzsche, Julius Caesar, Florence Nightingale, Oscar Wilde.
Were they alive today, and willing to submit themselves to scientific
scrutiny, the X-ray would tell us of the state of the pituitary and
thymus in them, chemical examinations of the blood the condition of
the thyroid and adrenals, detailed investigation of the body and mind
a flood of light upon their maladies as well as their personalities.
Therapy might have relieved Napoleon of his attacks, and so, halting
the creeping degeneration of his pituitary, made Waterloo impossible.
But then, would we have had the Emperor at all? Would there have been
enough of that instability that drives on the genius to his goal?
Nietzsche might have been relieved of his headaches, and Caesar of
his epilepsy--but then, would not--with correction of the underlying
streams of activity on the part of the other glands of the internal
secretion to compensate--their peculiar superiority and distinction,
and the fruits of their lives as by-products, have been destroyed.
Florence Nightingale, too, might have been a softer and more human
person. But then would she have revolutionized the practice of
nursing? Oscar Wilde possibly might have been made over into a
heterosexual. But then would not the world be the poorer without "De
Profundis," let us ask? To state the problem in the most general
terms: how much abnormality are we to tolerate (I speak, of course, of
malignant abnormality, and disregard benign abnormality altogether)
for the sake of the valuable that is concomitant? How much are we
to stand of that which degrades the germ-plasm while it raises the
mind-plasm of the race? The Flowers of Evil. Destroy or modify the
roots, change the seed, and the buds will bloom, if at all, not
orchids, but dull brown commonplaces.
What means may be licensed for the attainment of a worthy end is
perhaps the broadest aspect of the problem. The instruments of Man's
ascent to divinity may arouse his instinctive repulsions, dislikes,
and destructive passions. The study of the internal secretions is
putting and will put the most powerful apparatus for the control of
the abnormal into our hands. What are we going to do with them?
It does not follow that because we are beginning to understand the
normal that we are to establish one fixed absolute standard of the
normal. In view of all the possible mixtures, permutations and
combinations of the endocrine glands, that may construct an
individual, it is possible to conceive a million types of normals.
For normality means harmony, the harmonious equilibrium between the
hormones, which tends to continue itself, because it does no harm to
itself. So there are all sorts and conditions of men and women who
are classed as normals. We need create no inquiry into the value of
raising the subnormal to the normal level. It is when we come to
consider the possibility of lowering the supernormal (in certain
respects) to the normal, that we pause and hesitate. Traditional
morality assists not, but hinders us here.
Whatever the race may ultimately decide, it is safe to predict that it
is now somewhat possible, and will become more and more possible, to
regulate or even check the ills of genius, without interfering with
its highest evolution and expression. For example, Bernard Shaw, to
take a living man of genius, is pretty visibly a pituitocentric of the
well-balanced variety. He has the height, the facial features, the
hands, and the sort of mentality that run together in his endocrine
make-up. He also has the headaches. It is quite probable that feeding
him pituitary gland extract in the proper dosage would relieve him of
his headaches. A process might be started in his pituitary, however,
that would diminish its extraordinary output which has assisted
to make his brain so brilliant. The possibility, nevertheless,
is excessively remote as the pituitary predominance in him is so
overwhelming, that nothing short of surgery, nature's or the medical
graduate's, could really affect that overmastering eminence. The time
will come, though it is not yet by a long, long road, when we shall
be able to intervene, and perhaps meddle, in nature's most intimate
plans. The right of the power to modify, like the power to kill, will
be defined and limited by common agreement before that goal will be
reached.