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
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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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