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
There are possibilities the imagination may envisage. One may suppose
such a cretin, with all his other ductless glands intact, grown
successfully to manhood under careful medical guidance. No one but
himself is aware of his affliction, outside of his medical advisers.
Luck aids him to rise in the world, or perhaps he has been born with
a spoon of the precious metals in his mouth. Adolescence, love and
marriage dance their sequence. Our hero of course keeps his dread
secret to himself. Whether such an omission of confidence would
entitle his wife to a divorce is something courts will be called upon
to decide sooner or later. But, without anticipating, the honeymoon
involves a trip to the South Seas. A storm and a wreck throws them
alone on an island, tropical, easy to live on, and rescue in the
course of a few months certain. The man, to his horror, discovers that
he has saved of his medicaments only a pill box containing half a
dozen of thyroid tablets, his requirement being one a day. He sees
them go day by day. Finally they are all gone. He feels his faculties
slipping hour by hour. Shall he tell her? Indecision grips him, and he
delays until the day when his consciousness sinks to the point where
his mind no longer grasps his problem. The wife must endure the
spectacle of the enchantment of her husband, and his change from
gallant lover to dull animal ogre. A new version of Beauty and the
Beast!
Cretinism as one manifestation of a soul without thyroid or without
enough thyroid is not all. The first great successes with thyroid were
achieved in adults, particularly adult women, exhibiting a peculiar
obesity, coldness, loss of hair and teeth and a remarkable lassitude
and torpor that might be summed up as a chronic drowsiness, like a
saturation of the blood with some narcotic drug. Or there may be a
melancholia, or a lack of ability to seize the finer points of a
mental process, or an argument treated in the abstract. Children
are said to be lazy, slow or dull. They experience an irritating
difficulty in understanding questions and expressing their wants and
desires, and so are declared to be vicious, or stupid.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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