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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.
Post-pituitary in excess, without compensation or balancing by one or some of the other endocrines, is associated with an instability of mood and the organic outlook. Concomitant is a defective self-control. Typically, one sees the effects in the mental abnormalities of women during the premenstrual period.
It is possible to speak of thyroid moods, adrenal moods, ante-pituitary or post-pituitary moods, gonadal moods. Each of these is the echo in the mind of cells stimulated or depressed, by concentration or dilution in the blood of particular internal secretions. Restlessness and excitement can be produced experimentally by feeding thyroid.
Whether the feeding of excess post-pituitary would lead to a stimulation of the tendency or ability to imagine is still to be decided. But it is known that quieting the post-pituitary by various means will cause a depression of the faculty, and eliminate its pathologic manifestations.
A student of his make-up, and acquainted with present developments concerning the internal secretions, given an opportunity to observe him as we have when he was alive, and at the height of his success, would have had every reason for classing him a pituitary-centered, ante-pituitary superior, post-pituitary inferior, with an instability of both that would lead to his final degeneration.
In the first place his father was a variety of pituitocentric, of the post-pituitary inferior type, six feet two inches tall, exceedingly corpulent, and, in the eyes of his son, the sharpest of observers and the most sympathetic of men. He wished to make a physician out of his son in order to carry on the medical tradition of the family: Erasmus Darwin was a physician before him.
Even from the purely selfish point of view, the standpoint of enlightened selfishness, the post-pituitary type must beware of excesses. For disturbances of menstruation, psychic fears, anxieties, states of suspicion and obsession, various pains are among the penalties.
The ante-pituitary type of male, the strongly masculine, mates often with the post-pituitary type of female, the markedly feminine. The children exhibit the lineaments of the pituitary-centered type. The general trend seems to be the establishment of a better balanced, equilibrated type. Yet the children often are apt to segregate into pituitary dominants or pituitary deficients.
In women, the adrenal medulla naturally tends to overtop the cortex, because the latter makes for masculinity. Besides, the recurring cycle in the ovary, making the corpus luteum, evolves an additional stimulant to the medulla, through its irritating influence upon the thyroid. Then the influence of the post-pituitary is anti-adrenal cortex.
For ten lunar months, not another ovum breaks through the covering of the ovary, and the uterus is left undisturbed. The placental secretion plays a most important rôle as brake upon the post-pituitary, the most active of the feminizing uterus-disturbing endocrines.
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