Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    365/534 (page 349)
    ENDOCRINES AND HEREDITARY DEFECTIVENESS 349 in the human mind and body. We know that every living cell secretes carbon dioxide. Some authorities today even believe that the whole brain is a vast endocrine organ, giving out into the circulation substances which might properly be regarded as endocrines or hormones. The physiol¬ ogist has long ago called our attention to substances such as secretin which stimulates pancreatic secretion. It has more recently been shown that no matter where the developing optical vesicle of the embryo may be placed the skin immediately overlying it will promptly develop into a crystalline lens. We know very little of the function of the adrenal, outside of the fact that it influences blood pressure, can apparently be affected by psychic stimulation as well as chemical, and that mammals die in little more than twenty-four hours when it is removed, and that its effect is so very subtle that one part of adrenalin in one hundred mülion of Ringer's solution pro¬ duced a marked effect on the contraction of involuntary muscle. Descartes thought the pineal body was the seat of the soul, and we know little more about it now, except that when it is removed there often occurs a precocious development of the sexual organs. The limits of this paper forbid the discussion of the interesting developments in recent years re¬ garding the sex glands and secondary sexual characteristics, though it is evident that the fetus in the pregnant female must act somewhat in the rôle of an endocrine, as the injection of an extract of fetus from a pregnant female into the blood vessels of a virgin rabbit produces an immediate growth of the mammary glands. This is further illustrated by the famous case of the Blazek sisters, who were joined like the Siamese twins, since pregnancy in one produced a normal growth of the mammary glands in the other, and with the birth of the child the secretion of milk occurred in the glands of both individuals. Severe disturbance in the endocrine system unfailingly leads to more or less marked criminalistic, immoral, and antisocial behavior. When the secretory disturbance is limited to the sex glands, it sometimes results in the production merely of feminine men and masculine women. We have at last progressed to the point where we know that most of the freaks in the dime museum of the circus—the bearded lady, the giant, the fat girl, and the midget—these marvelous freaks of nature, are due to endocrine disturbance, but we have not progressed to that point where we are able to offer practical help to these victims of ductless gland dystrophy. Much less are we able to formulate precise opinions and suggest definite remedies with reference to this almost wholly unexplored and undeveloped field of hereditary mental defectiveness and the relation of endocrine dis¬ turbance to the defective germ-plasm which is the cause thereof.