The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human NatureBerman, Louis
History
The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature
Berman, Louis
Endocrinology; Personality
During pregnancy, in consequence, the integrity of every structure
of the body is tested. A stern, relentless accountant goes over the
cells, counts up their reserves, establishes a balance, credits and
debits according to the demands of the growing parasite within them.
Follow changes in the skin, the bones, the nervous system and the
mind. That is, all the glands, subtle recorders, transmitters,
producers of the vibrations of change are influenced. But the most
influential are the most affected, as the most dominant personalities
in a community are most disturbed by a revolution.
In Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street," the best novel ever made about
America as a nation of villagers, the heroine, Carol Kennicott, has
this to say to someone sentimentalizing about maternity.
"I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogar. My complexion is rotten, and my
hair is coming out, and I look like a potato bag, and I think my
arches are falling,... and the whole business is a confounded nuisance
of a biological process."
The exploration of the internal secretions has brought us an
explanation and an understanding of why child-bearing is a nuisance.
We know now that if Carol Kennicott's complexion became rotten and
her hair fell out, it was because her thyroid was not adequate to the
demands of pregnancy, and that if her arches were falling, and her
figure acquiring a potato bag dumpiness, it was because her pituitary
was insufficient. In all probability she was a thymus-centered type,
which accounts for much of the material that goes to make up the
novel.
Different endocrine types react characteristically toward the
situations of pregnancy. The adrenal type may not be able to respond
with the necessary enlargement of its cortex which is normal for the
needs of gestation. So pigmentations, darkenings and discolorations of
the skin, especially of the face, the traditional chloasma develops.
The hyperthyroid type may become sharply exaggerated, almost to the
point of mania and psychosis. The subthyroid will suffer an emphasis
of her defect, and pass on, because of pregnancy, to the truly
diseased state of myxedema, the state of dull, slow, stupid,
semi-animal semi-idiocy. The pituitary type becomes more masculinized.
The face becomes more triangular and coarser, the chin and cheek-bones
more pronounced, and there is a growth of all the bones, so that she
is seen to grow visibly in height and breadth, and in the size of the
hands and feet. Concomitantly, there is a changed, a more matured and
steadier outlook upon life, all due to stimulation of the anterior
pituitary, controller of growth, physical and mental.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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