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Updated: May 9, 2025
Like the thymus, it has been supposed one of the distinctive organs of childhood and to die with it. Generations of anatomists solemnly asserted, repeating each other's mistakes with the aplomb of the historians who declare that history repeats itself, that the pineal body was a useless, wastefully space consuming vestige of a once important structure.
Sexual precocity in boys may be produced by a premature overactivity not only of the specific reproductive organs: the testes, but also by an early excess of secretion on the part of the cortex of the adrenal gland or the pituitary gland, or by a too early involution of the pineal or thymus.
On one occasion he remarked reflectively: "It is odd how much better I feel when I let other children play with my toys than when I play with them myself." Other statements attributed to him imply the most astounding maturity of thought and mental process. Headaches finally came, and he died about four weeks later. The cause of the whole bizarre tragedy was found to be a tumor of the pineal gland.
Now, from the best accounts he had been able to get of this matter, he was satisfied it could not be where Des Cartes had fixed it, upon the top of the pineal gland of the brain; which, as he philosophized, formed a cushion for her about the size of a marrow pea; tho' to speak the truth, as so many nerves did terminate all in that one place, 'twas no bad conjecture; and my father had certainly fallen with that great philosopher plumb into the centre of the mistake, had it not been for my uncle Toby, who rescued him out of it, by a story he told him of a Walloon officer at the battle of Landen, who had one part of his brain shot away by a musket-ball, and another part of it taken out after by a French surgeon; and after all, recovered, and did his duty very well without it.
Western physiologists are at sea regarding the function and office of this interesting organ, or gland, and the text books generally content themselves with stating that "the functions of the Pineal Gland are not understood."
This was the commencement of organotherapy. Since that time investigation of the more important organs of internal secretion namely, the gonads, thyroid, thymus, suprarenals, pituitary, and pineal bodies has been carried on both by clinical observation and experiment by a great number of physiologists with very striking results, and new hormones have been discovered in the walls of the intestine and other organs.
The members became an inner environment, known only in so far as they affected the pineal gland; just as the outer environment in its turn was to be known only in so far as it affected the members. This doctrine of a double environment was wholly artificial.
It is very hard to form a definite notion of what this phraseology means, when it is taken in connexion with the location of the soul in the pineal gland; and I can only represent it to myself as signifying that the soul is a mathematical point, having place but not extension, within the limits of the pineal gland.
The tradition is, that there is a certain centre of force in the head, perhaps the "pineal gland," which some of our Western philosophers have supposed to be the dwelling of the soul, a centre which is, as it were, the door way between the natural and the spiritual man.
With delayed involution of the pineal, obesity results. The elasticity of the skin is another quality that varies with the concentration in the blood of the internal secretions. Elasticity of the skin, its recoil upon being stretched like a rubber band, may be taken as a measure of the activity of all the endocrine glands.
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