Part 22 (1/2)

What other hints have we that in spite of his fatigue disease he was a pituitocentric? The record of his physique and physiognomy, doc.u.mentary 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 ent.i.tled ”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 interst.i.tial 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 G.o.d did shake His coward lips did from their color fly; And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world, Did lose his l.u.s.tre: I did hear him groan.

--Julius Caesar.

Epilepsy, the ”falling sickness” or ”fits,” is generally a.s.sociated with a deterioration or degeneration of mentality, and an inferior personality is frequently an ingredient. Progressively increasing data acc.u.mulate 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 G.o.d did shake.”

According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar was of slender build, fair-complexioned, pale, emaciated, of a delicate const.i.tution (reminding us of Darwin), subject to severe headache and violent attacks of epilepsy. In view of the work of Cus.h.i.+ng, 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 a.n.a.logy 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 ma.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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'hote 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 cla.s.s, and in her diary she records her doubts and cravings, and her revolt against what is a.s.sumed by her family and friends to be the normal course of existence for her. The att.i.tudes and questionings in these pa.s.sages, the religious feeling displayed, are distinctly masculine. Most easily could the following, for instance, pa.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstance 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 s.e.xic.u.m of the prurient majority. Oscar Wilde was a h.o.m.os.e.xual of a certain type. In view of the previously laid down considerations concerning the endocrine genesis of h.o.m.os.e.xuality, 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 cla.s.sed 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 ma.s.sive 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual 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 a.s.serted 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.