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