The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖
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myxoedema, which occurs mainly in women and is also due to a
deficiency in the thyroid secretion. As a result the patient, who
may have been a bright, capable, energetic person, full of the
eager purposes and emotions of life, gradually becomes dull,
stupid, apathetic, without fear, anger, love, joy or sorrow, and
without purpose or striving. In addition the body changes, the
hair becomes coarse and scanty, the skin thick and swollen (hence
the name of the disease) and various changes take place in the
sweat secretion, the heart action, etc.
Then, having made the diagnosis, work the great miracle! Obtain
the dried thyroid glands of the sheep, prepared by the great drug
houses as a by-product of the butcher business, and feed this
poor, transformed creature with these glands! No fairy waving a
magical wand ever worked a greater enchantment, for with the
first dose the patient improves and in a relatively short time is
restored to normal in skin, hair, sweat, etc., and MIND and
character! To every physician who has seen this happen under his
own eyes and by his direction there comes a conviction that mind
and character have their seat in the organic activities of the
body,—and nowhere else.
An interesting confirmation of this is that when the thyroid is
overactive, a condition called hyperthyroidism, the patient
becomes very restless and thin, shows excessive emotionality,
sleeplessness, has a rapid heart action, tremor and many other
signs not necessary to detail here. The thyroid in these cases is
usually swollen. One of the methods used to treat the disease is
to remove some of the gland surgically. In the early days an
operator would occasionally remove too, much gland and then the
symptoms, of myxoedema would occur. This necessitated the
artificial feeding of thyroid the rest of the patient’s life!
With the proper dosage of the gland substance the patient remains
normal; with too little she becomes dull and stupid; with too
much she becomes unstable and emotional!
There are plenty of other examples of the influence of the
endocrines on mind, character and personality. I here briefly
mention a few of these.
In the disease called acromegaly, which is due to a change in the
pituitary gland, amongst other things are noted “melancholic
tendencies, loss of memory and mental and physical torpor.”
A very profound effect on character and personality, exclusive of
intelligence, is that of the sex glands. One need not accept the
Freudian extravagances regarding the way in which the sex
feelings and impulses enter into our thoughts, emotions, purposes
and acts. No unbiased observer of himself or his fellows but
knows that the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of the sex
feeling, its excitation or its suppression are of great
importance in the destinies of character. Further, man as
herdsman and man as tyrant have carried on huge experiments to
show how necessary to normal character the sex glands are.
As herdsman he has castrated his male Bos and obtained the ox.
And the ox is the symbol of patience, docility, steady labor,
without lust or passion,—and the very opposite of his
non-castrated brother, the bull. The bull is the symbol of
irritability and unteachableness, who will not be easily yoked or
led and who is the incarnation of lust and passion. One is the
male transformed into neuter gender; and the other is rampant
with the fierceness of his sex.
Compare the eunuch and the normal man. If the eunuch state be
imposed in infancy, the shape of the body, its hairiness, the
quality of the voice and the character are altered in
characteristic manner. The eunuch essentially is neither man nor
woman, but a repelling Something intermediate.
Enough has been said to show that mind and character are
dependent upon the health of the brain and the glands of the
body; that somewhere in the interaction of tissues, in the
chemistry of life, arises thought, purpose, emotion, conduct and
deed. But we need not go so far afield as pathology to show this,
for common experience demonstrates it as well.
If character is control of emotions, firmness of purpose,
cheerfulness of outlook and vigor of thought and memory, then the
tired man, worn out by work or a long vigil, is changed in
character. Such a person in the majority of cases is irritable,
showing lack of control and emotion; he slackens in his life’s
purposes, loses cheerfulness and outlook and finds it difficult
to concentrate his thoughts or to recall his memories. Though
this change is temporary and disappears with rest, the essential
fact is not altered, namely, fatigue alters character. It is also
true that not all persons show this vulnerability to fatigue in
equal measure. For that matter, neither do they show an equal
liability to infectious diseases, equal reaction to alcohol or
injury. The feeling of vigor which rest gives changes the
expression of personality to a marked degree. It is true that we
are not apt to think of the tired man as changed in character;
yet we must admit on reflection that he has undergone
transformation.
Even a loaded bowel may, as is well known, alter the reaction to
life. Among men who are coarse in their language there is a
salutation more pertinent than elegant that inquires into the
state of the bowels.[1] The famous story of Voltaire and the
Englishman, in which the sage agreed to suicide because life was
not worth living when his digestion was disordered and who broke
his agreement when he purged himself, illustrates how closely
mood is related to the intestinal tract. And mood is the
background of the psychic life, upon which depends the direction
of our thoughts, cheerful or otherwise, the vigor of our will and
purpose. Mood itself arises in part from the influences that
stream into the muscles, joints, heart, lungs, liver, spleen,
kidneys, digestive tract and all the organs and tissues by way of
the afferent nerves (sympathetic and cerebro-spinal). Mood is
thus in part a reflection of the health and proper working of the
organism; it is the most important aspect of the
subconsciousness, and upon it rests the structure of character
and personality.
[1] What is called coarse is frequently crudely true. Thus, in
the streets, in the workshops, and where men untrammeled by
niceties engage in personalities the one who believes the other
to be a “crank” informs him in crude language that he has
intestinal stasis (to put the diagnosis in medical language) and
advises him accordingly to “take a pill.”
This does not mean that only the healthy are cheerful, or that
the sick are discouraged. To affirm the dependence of mind upon
body is not to deny that one may build up faith, hope, courage,
through example and precept, or that one may not inherit a
cheerfulness and courage (or the reverse). “There are men,” says
James, “who are born under a cloud.” But exceptional individuals
aside, the mass of mankind generates its mood either in the
tissues of the body or in the circumstances of life.
Children, because they have not built up standards of thought,
mood and act, demonstrate in a remarkable manner the dependence
of their character upon health.
A child shows the onset of an illness by a complete change in
character. I remember one sociable, amiable lad of two, rich in
the curiosity and expanding friendliness of that time of life,
who became sick with diphtheria. All his basic moods became
altered, and all his wholesome reactions to life disappeared. He
was cross and contrary, he had no interest in people or in
things, he acted very much as do those patients in an insane
hospital who suffer from Dementia Praecox. What is character if
it is not interest and curiosity, friendliness and love,
obedience and trust, cheerfulness and courage? Yet a sick child,
especially if very young, loses all these and takes on the
reverse characters. The little lad spoken of became “himself”
again when the fever and the pain lifted. Yet for a long time
afterward he showed a greater liability to fear than before, and
it was not until six months or more had repaired the more subtle
damage to his organism that he became the hardy little adventurer
in life that he had been before the illness.
There is plenty of chemical proof of this thesis as here set
forth. Men have from time immemorial put things “in their bellies
to steal their brains away.” The chemical substance known as
ethyl alcohol has been an artificial basis of good fellowship the
world over, as well as furnishing a very fair share of the
tragedy, the misery and the humor of the world. This is because,
when ingested in any amount, its absorption produces changes in
the flow of thought, in the attitude toward life, in the mood,
the emotions, the purposes, the conduct,—in a word, in
character. One sees the austere man, when drunk, become ribald;
the repressed, close-fisted become open-mouthed and
open-hearted; the kindly, perhaps brutal; the controlled,
uncontrolled. In the change of character it effects is the regret
over its passing and the greatest reason for prohibition.
Alcohol causes several well-defined mental diseases as well as
mere drunkenness. In Delirium Tremens there is an acute delirium,
with confusion, excitement and auditory and visual hallucinations
of all kinds. The latter symptom is so prominent as to give the
reason for the popular name of the “snakes.” In alcoholic
hallucinosis the patient has delusions of persecution and hears
voices accusing him of all kinds of wrong-doing. Very
frequently, as all the medical writers note, these voices are
“conscience exteriorized”; that is, the voices say of him just
what he has been saying of himself in the struggle against drink.
Then there is Alcoholic Paranoia, a disease in which the main
change is a delusion of jealousy directed against the mate, who
is accused of infidelity. It is interesting that in the last two
diseases the patient is “clear-headed”; memory and orientation
are good; the patient speaks well and gives no gross signs of his
trouble. As the effects of the alcohol wear away, the patient
recovers,—i.e., his character returns to its normal.
It becomes necessary at this point to take up a reverse side of
our study, namely, what is often called the influence of “mind
over matter.” Such cures of disease as seem to follow prayer and
faith are cited; such incidents as the great strength of men
under emotion or the disturbances of the body by ideas are listed
as examples. This is not the place to discuss cures by faith. It
suffices to say this: that in the first place most of such cures
relate to hysteria, a disease we shall discuss later but which is
characterized by symptoms that appear and disappear like magic. I
have seen “cured” (and have “cured”) such patients, affected with
paralysis, deafness, dumbness, blindness, etc., with reasoning,
electricity, bitter tonics, fake electrodes, hypnotism, and in
one case by a forcible slap upon a prominent and naked part of
the body. Hysteria has been the basis of many a saint’s
reputation and likewise has aided many a physician into
affluence.
Nor is the effect of coincidence taken into account in estimating
cures, whether by faith or by drugs. Many a physician has owed
his start to the fact that he was called in on some obscure case
just when the patient was on the turn towards recovery. He then
receives the credit that belonged to Nature. Medical men
understand this,—that many diseases are “self-limited” and pass
through a cycle influenced but little by treatment. But faith
curists do not so understand, and neither does the mass of
people, so that neither one nor the other separates “post hoc”
from “propter hoc.” If the truth were told, most of the miracle
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