Early Endocrinology

Went to the 57th Annual Volunteer Nonprofit Service Association Used Book Sale today at the Arizona State Fairgrounds. The Exhibit Center was filled to the brim with books and people. It took about an hour of standing in line just to get in.

I made a beeline for the science and medical textbooks, where I discovered a copy of The Glands Regulating Personality, by Louis Berman, MD. This 341-page tome educates the reader regarding the effects various glands and "internal secretions" on human behavior. The nascent field of endocrinology (circa 1921) was enjoying popularity at the time.

Naturally, I immediately consulted the Index to learn about homosexuality.

First, an excerpt to establish medical and scientific expertise of the era:

The accessibility of the thyroid gland in the next, the ease of surgical approach, the definite effects following its removal, and then the miraculous marvels of the feeding of thyroid have rendered it the center of attack by the largest army of endocrine investigators. As a result we know more about the thyroid in childhood, adolescence, adult life and old age than about the other glands.

It's a small blob in the middle of your chest, under the breastbone. 

Such research revealed that the thymus typically calms down after puberty. But not always:

It is after puberty, when the thymus should shrink and pass out of the endocrine concert as a power, that the more complex reactions of personality emerge when the thymus persists and refuses to or cannot retire. The persistent thymus always, then, throws its shadow over the entire personality.

A hyperactive thymus causes problems (Eugen Steinach was Austrian, of course):

The persistence of the thymus after adolescence makes for an arrest of masculinization or feminization, the end-point arrived at by the process of puberty. That is, a partial castration takes place. Now, as the experiments of Steinach upon the transplantation of ovaries into males deprived of their testes and of testes into females deprived of their ovaries have demonstrated, the removal of the interstitial cells of one sex assists enormously in arousing the opposite sex traits that have been latent, homosexuality. In a thymo-centric, tendencies to homosexuality and masochism appear.

Gay guinea pig wedding. Caused by science.

 Oh, us poor, unfortunate, thymo-centrics:

Homosexuality, in one form or another, frank or concealed, haunts the thymo-centric and spoils his life. The persistent thymus, like a vindictive Electra, stalks the footsteps of its victim, its possessor. He wishes to live, according to society's remorselessly rigid expectations, for virility and happiness. But his thymus condition forces him also to live for femininity and misery. That homosexuality is not purely a psychology matter, of complexes and introversion, as the newest psychology would have us believe, has been proved by observations of its development in animals with internal secretion disturbances, acquired or experimental.

 But remember, there are other glands:

If the pituitary and the thyroid can enlarge to compensate for their defects, they may become the queer brilliants, the eccentric geniuses of the arts and sciences. ... Certain of them, after a stormy life in the twenties, become adapted to their surroundings in the thirties because the pituitary gradually emerges and becomes dominant in their personalities. They are then recessive thymo-centrics. An increase in size, a broadening, together with a greater mental tranquility and stability, accompany the adaptation. Historically, the thymo-centrics who combined brilliancy and instability played a great part as some of the famous adventurers and restless experimentalists.

Neener neener, thymus. We win.

In other words...

It gets better.