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Updated: May 13, 2025
Before this can happen an event announced in the female by the onset of menstruation, two conditions must be fulfilled in the endocrine history of the individual. There must be a certain atrophy and retrogression of the thymus gland, and there must likewise be a similar atrophy and retirement of the pineal gland.
The changes after birth consist chiefly in growth; but not altogether, since at least one organ, the thymus gland, becomes smaller and completely disappears during childhood, and other organs, especially the liver, are proportionately smaller in the adult than in the infant. The body of the infant also differs from that of the man in possessing greater softness and flexibility.
Removal of the thymus hastens the development of the gonads. Situated in the chest, astride the windpipe, it descends and covers over the upper portion of the heart, overlapping the great vessels at the base of the heart. It is a brownish red mass, which when cut presents the spongy effect of a sweetbread.
Closer observation, however, reveals points of differentiation and signs of the coming potencies of the other hormones. During the second period, up to puberty, these marks of the deeper underlying forces of the personality make themselves more and more felt. The thymus, like a brake that is becoming worn out, continues to function in a progressively weaker fashion.
He will be taken up in the consideration of internal secretion personalities. Then there are the varied and remarkable phenomena of thymus enlargement and hyperactivity in childhood itself. When an enlarged thymus is present in an infant, the initiation of breathing in the new-born, the introduction of the newcomer to the oxygen of the air, may be an exceedingly prolonged, difficult, matter.
There is evidence that the thymus is involved in the health and efficiency of muscle cells and muscularity.
That is to say, officially its involution begins. Careful dissection will demonstrate some thymus tissue even in a normal subject up to the fourteenth year. This refers to the average normal, for the large thymus may continue large and grow larger after the second year in the type of individual designated in a preceding chapter as the thymocentric.
Pregnant animals fed on thyroid give birth to young with large thymus glands. The diet of the mother has been proved conclusively to influence the development and constitution of the child. As the internal secretions influence the history of the food in the body, they affect development in the womb indirectly as well as directly.
Were they alive today, and willing to submit themselves to scientific scrutiny, the X-ray would tell us of the state of the pituitary and thymus in them, chemical examinations of the blood the condition of the thyroid and adrenals, detailed investigation of the body and mind a flood of light upon their maladies as well as their personalities.
The thyroid and thymus are antagonistic, for the thyroid hastens differentiation, puberty and the coming of sexual maturity, while the thymus delays and retards them and prolongs the period of childhood.
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