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