Part 17 (1/2)
In civil life, the complex of symptoms Beard jumbled together as neurasthenia, when a.s.sociated with a loss of self-control, so that the sufferer is incapacitated for the duties of everyday life, has become the popular ”nervous breakdown.” A sanitarium appears to be one of the necessary components of the condition. It is the last act, the climax of ”nerves.”
During the War of 1914-1918, thousands of cases of functional disorders of the nervous came to be grouped under ”Sh.e.l.l Shock.”
The psychic phenomena in the wake of concussion of the brain due to explosives suggested the term, and its application to affections of self-control, or dissociations of the personality, with paralysis, blindness, speechlessness, loss of hearing and so on. The War neurosis (including those arising in home service) is still a topical subject because thousands of mentally disabled soldiers are alive.
In view of what has been said concerning the endocrine mechanism of the instincts and the vegetative apparatus, it could be predicted that a number of these nerve casualties of peace and war would be caused by an upset of the equilibrium between the glands of internal secretion.
A study of war neuroses by the great Italian student of the endocrines, Pende, confirms this a.s.sumption. As emphasized, the internal secretions are like tuning keys, and tighten or loosen the strings of the organism-instrument, the nerves. War for the soldier, or the civilian combatant as well, sets the strings vibrating, and with them the glands controlled by them. Excessive stimulation or depression of an endocrine will disturb the whole chain of hormones, and the vegetative system, and their echoes in the psyche. The nervous disorders of war that have been lumped as sh.e.l.l shock or war shock may be looked upon as uncompensated; airings of the endocrine vegetative mechanism, as dislocations of parts and processes that are reflected outwardly as ailment or disease.
AN ENDOCRINE NEUROSIS
An exquisite example of an endocrine neurosis, that is a disorder of nerves and brain dependent upon an upset of the equilibrium between the internal secretions due to a trying experience, was furnished recently by the reactions of three naval officers lost in the snow wilds of Canada through a balloon adventure. The cases aroused a good deal of interest at the time, and the details were reported by the newspapers as if they were the episodes of a serial mystery story.
The three officers started out late one fine evening from Rockaway Air Station in a balloon for a practice trip. Atmospheric conditions suddenly changed, they became lost in the clouds, and finally landed somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. The commander of the balloon crew, Lieut. A., 23 years old, was the youngest of the three; the oldest, Lieut. B., being 45, and the third man in the thirties, Lieut.
C.
According to the testimony given at the Court of Inquiry held afterwards, two hours after they abandoned the balloon and started struggling through the snow, B. became tired and complained of his fatigue. B.'s fatigue increased, and two days later became so great that the party had to stop for an hour and build a fire in order to permit him to rest. However, an hour proved too little: and in another half hour he was falling and fainting.
Letters written by C. to his wife and gotten hold of by reporters declared that B. at this juncture pa.s.sed into a semi-sane state, in which he accused himself of a number of sins, and volunteered to commit suicide, so that the others would not be burdened by his weakness. Also, that they might use his body to fortify themselves. A.
discussed with C. the advisability of taking B.'s knife away from him. Living on their carrier pigeons, they continued on, moved by a desperate hope of finding someone. B. had several fainting spells after drinking water traced by moose tracks.
Luck favored them, and they encountered an Indian who guided them to a place called Moose Factory. Here they wrote the letters home which reached their wives and the daily press before they themselves returned to civilization. A great hue and cry was raised by the newspapers about their plight. Newspaper correspondents vied with each other for the honor of being the first to meet them and get their story.
They arrived at a collection of houses named Mattice. A. and C.
proceeded ahead and found instructions for them not to talk. C. went back to B., who was in a shack with the correspondents full of the story of the letters. B. became enraged and struck C. who retained his self-control.
Differences were patched up, and the three returned together to New York. There the medical examination of the three showed that the four days in the wilderness had left its deepest effects upon the physique and mind of B. In a few days he developed an attack of tonsillitis, with fever, and a mental disturbance described by the medical officer as exhaustion psychosis. He believed this condition to be the result of severe exhaustion, prolonged anxiety, worry, and extreme exposure.
Extreme restlessness and irritability, confusion of thought and an undefined perplexity, all the prominent symptoms of exhaustion psychosis, making him hyperactive and inclined to acts of violence, were in evidence.
The physique, character and reactions of Lieut. B. are what interest us in the case. The pictures of him published, and the structure of his skull, face and teeth, his hair and other physical traits point to his being an adrenal-centered type, of the unstable variety, so far as his internal secretion make-up is concerned. As we shall see in the next chapter on the different kinds of endocrine personalities, the unstable adrenocentric (convenient name for the cla.s.s) is characterized by rapid exhaustibility because under conditions of stress and strain, the reserve of the gland is consumed. The adrenal glands, we noted in a preceding chapter, are concerned with the maintenance of muscle and nerve tone in emergencies. They are the glands which, during crises especially, control the production and supply of energy to the various organs and tissues called upon to function to the utmost in emergencies. When the adrenals fail, as they do readily in these labile adrenocentrics, it is as if the adrenals were cut out of the body. And it has been repeatedly shown that extirpation of the adrenals is immediately followed by degeneration and breakdown of the brain cells.
These facts explain the reactions of Lieut. B. The acute call upon his adrenals made by his dangerous situation probably soon exhausted them of their content of reserve secretions. Overwhelming fatigue with loss of muscle tone followed. The changes in the brain caused him to talk as he did in the wilderness. Returned to safety, the news that his reputation was under fire because of C.'s letter brought out another adrenal characteristic: the excessive instinct of pugnacity, easily stimulated, with its emotion of anger and the tendency to violence.
What is spoken of as a quick temper is an adrenocentric trait.
Returned to New York, an infection, tonsillitis, attacked him.
Infections in adrenocentrics use up the content of the adrenals as rapidly as physical exhaustion or emotion. So the tonsillitis, which in another type of individual would have been combatted continuously by the adrenals and so pa.s.sed by as a mere sore throat, presented him with a high temperature, and the brain disturbance described by the medical officer as exhaustion-psychosis, with again a tendency to violence. In short, the history of his adventure is the history of his adrenals under stress and strain. It ill.u.s.trates the mechanism of a typical endocrine neurosis.
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE VISCERA
In the chapter on the glands of internal secretion as an interlocking directorate, certain generalities were stated as the laws of the government of the organism's life by them in a.s.sociation with the vegetative apparatus. It was put forward as a fundamental revision of the theory, hitherto accepted, of the limitation of mind to the brain cells. We think and feel not alone with the brain, but with our muscles, our viscera, our vegetative nerves, and last but not least our endocrine organs. In short, we think and feel with each and every part of ourselves.
Among these pristine factors determining the content of consciousness, the endocrines are most important, because they alone to start with, of all the other factors, are different in each and every individual.
They are what render him unique at birth, even though he looks the counterpart of millions of other babies born at the same time. They const.i.tute his inner destiny. As he grows, the external factors, social experiences, climate, accidents, and disease modify and condition the reactions and complexity of the endocrine system. As these modifications and a.s.sociations are of the greatest import for the final elaboration of the personality, composing as they do the elements of the unconscious which confers the unique stamp of normal, abnormal, supernormal, or subnormal, it is worth while now to review the most general of the determining laws. Man is an energy phenomenon, both conscious and unconscious, with the energy emanating from the endocrine-vegetative mechanisms. So it becomes possible for us, by their aid, to a.n.a.lyze the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious with the terms long current in the a.n.a.lyses of physics.
1. Man is an energy machine which, though it is constantly losing energy as a whole; consists of parts constantly acc.u.mulating energy (as a result of inherent chemical reactions accelerated by the absorption of food). This process of local acc.u.mulation of energy a.s.sociated with general loss of energy may be observed even in the ameba, in the form of stored reserve food material. Evolution created a system of organs, the viscera, as specialists in energy conservation, utilization or transformation.
For intercommunication and interaction between the viscera two systems were elaborated: a younger system of direct contacts, the nerves, and nerve cells, through which influences could be conducted for the stimulation, acceleration, r.e.t.a.r.dation or inhibition of an energy process in them; and the older, the endocrine gland a.s.sociation, for the production of chemical substances to act as messengers to be sent from one viscus to another, and also to the nerves, through the blood or lymph which bathe all the cells. They could affect only one or certain organs, because by selection only the chosen organ or organs knew the code, as it were. The chemical system is much the older system, and preceded the nerve system by aeons of time. The whole system, viscera, visceral nerves and the endocrines gradually united into a complete autonomous organism within the organism, and as such functions as the vegetative apparatus.
EVOLUTION OF THE ENDOCRINES