Understanding yourself : the mental hygiene of personality / by Ernest R. Groves.

  • Ernest R. Groves
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Understanding yourself : the mental hygiene of personality / by Ernest R. Groves. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The influences that are handed down to us that tend to create one type of skeleton rather than another are not so much in the bones themselves as in other parts of the body that determine growth of bone. For example, we find one of the endocrine glands, the pituitary, having much to do with the size of the skeleton. If it functions excessively, a giant is created; if deficiently, we have a dwarf. This does not mean, however, that this gland alone operates upon growth, because it also is influenced by the working of other glands. That is to say, there is a combination of fea¬ tures of the body suggesting inheritance that has much to do with the determining of the character of an individual skeleton. The skeleton also registers the history and the habits of the body life of the person. Injury and disease, for example, may have a clear effect on the growth of the skeleton and in turn upon the personality itself. An illustration of this is infantile paralysis. Here we have a bacterial infec¬ tion that injures a part of the nervous substance of the spinal cord, resulting in loss of function of arms or legs which in turn, in the case of a growing skeleton, leads to permanent changes in the bony structure. The skeleton may also disclose the effect of the habits of the individual, and this we see when we consider the influence of diet upon the developing skeleton. The drink¬ ing of milk, which provides calcium needed for the growth of bones, cannot turn tall men into short nor short men into tall ones, but it does have a direct influence which modifies [28]