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
All this clarification of the concept of the glands of internal
secretion occurred in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
However, no inkling of their real importance to the body, of which
quantitatively they form so insignificant a part, was apparently
revealed to anyone. Not even the most daring speculation or brilliant
guess work in physiology engaged them as material. Thus Henle, the
great anatomist, calmly affirmed that these glands "have no influence
on animal life: they may be extirpated or they degenerate without
sensation or motion suffering in the least." Johann Müller, the most
celebrated physiologist of his day and contemporary of Henle, wrote
in 1844 and coolly stated, "The ductless glands are alike in one
particular--they either produce a different change in the blood which
circulates through them or the lymph which they elaborate plays a
special rôle in the formation of blood or of chyle." In other words,
they were dismissed as curious nonentities, of no real significance
to the running of the body. Laennec, the French founder of the Art of
Diagnosis in Medicine, once said that nothing about a science is more
interesting than the progress of that science itself. He might have
added that nothing either was more interesting than the contradictions
in that progress. For while these grand moguls of their sciences were
enunciating their dogmas, pioneers here and there were already setting
the mines that were to explode them.
The experimental method, to the value of which biologists were
just beginning to awaken, was destined to be the vehicle of Time's
revenges. An application of it to the mysteries of sex was the
immediate occasion. Sex and sex differences have always more or less
obsessed the imagination of mankind. The volumes of theories about
them would constitute a respectable museum. Certain gross facts,
however, were known. The effects of loss of the sex glands upon the
configuration of the body and the predominating constitution in
animals and eunuchs have always attracted attention. The proverbs and
stories of all nations are full of references to them. But up to the
nineteenth century no controlled experimental work was ever carried
out regarding them. It was in 1849, that A.A. Berthold of Göttingen, a
quiet, sedate lecturer, carried out the pioneer experiment of removing
the testes of four roosters and transplanting them under the skin. It
was Berthold's idea to test whether a gland with a definite external
secretion, and a duct through which that secretion was expelled,
but which yet had powers over the body as a whole that were to be
attributed only to an internal secretion, could not be shown, by
a clean-cut experiment, to possess such an internal secretion. He
succeeded perfectly. For he found that, though, in thus separating the
gland from its duct and so cutting off its external secretion, the
action of the cells manufacturing that secretion was destroyed, the
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