Endocrine gland

“ The posterior lobe of the pituitary body constitutes, with the pars intermedia, a second endocrine gland, which generates a stimulatory hormone called pituitrin. This hormone stimulates unstriated muscle to contract, and thereby regulates the discharge of secretions from various glands of the body, e. g. the mammary glands, bladder, etc. Hence the hypophysis, far from being a useless organ, is an indispensable one. Moreover, it is an integral and important part of the cryptorhetic system.
The same story may be repeated of the thyroid glands. ”

“ ENDOCRINE ANALYSIS The modes of classification glimpsed at are certainly exceedingly broad and sweeping. It is well enough to establish types and classes. But beneath them are sheltered the infinite possibilities of permutations and combinations, which explain the countless variety and complexity of form and function. Every individual born among the vertebrates, for example, must have a certain definite amount and percentage of pituitary gland, anterior and posterior, pineal, thyroid, parathyroid, thymus, adrenal, pancreas, interstitial and so on. ”

“ As a matter of fact, it is a study of libido variation, with endocrine variation, at two stages of the inner chemical life of a woman.
The chain of events at the menopause, the acme and then ebb of the sex tide, may be summed up something like this:
The ovaries cease producing their eggs and so shrivel as a storage battery atrophies when it dries up. An important member of the endocrine board of directors thus drops out, and so a rearrangement of gland activities, a new régime, becomes necessary. If a balance of power is established quickly and equitably, very little happens. ”

“ The internal secretion formula of an individual may, in the future, constitute his measurement which will place him accurately in the social system.
"More and more we are forced to realize that the general form and external appearance of the human body depends, to a large extent, upon the functioning, during the early developmental period, of the endocrine glands. ”

“ CHAPTER X THE TYPES OF PERSONALITY THE ENDOCRINE PERSONALITY If a single gland can dominate the life history of an individual it becomes possible to speak of endocrine types, the result of the endocrine analysis of the individual. ”

“ THE BIOLOGY OF ENLIGHTENMENT:
Are there glandular changes that accompany the dying process (as in the case of U.G.'s Calamity) ? Dr. Paul Lynn in the U.S. stresses the way the thymus gland functions. Other glands, like the pineal and the pituitary, are also affected. The thinking consciousness of man is affected by propaganda, persuasion or drugs. Mystical enlightenment is different: it is physiological mutation where endocrine transformation reacting with the nervous system causes changes.
The Endocrine Orchestra: The anterior pituitary operates through the hypothalamus and the pineal gland. ”

“ In the second place the gonads, once activated and in normal working order, react upon the other ductless glands. It thus comes about that the relative proportion or relative activity of the parts of the whole ductless gland system is different in male and female. Blair Bell is the protagonist of this view. A woman is a woman, he says, not merely because of her ovaries, but because of all her internal secretions, of her endocrine balance as a whole. ”

“ In view of all the possible mixtures, permutations and combinations of the endocrine glands, that may construct an individual, it is possible to conceive a million types of normals. For normality means harmony, the harmonious equilibrium between the hormones, which tends to continue itself, because it does no harm to itself. ”

“ One suggested thyroid extract and perhaps Brown-Sequard’s testicular juices, and there seemed to be a more general agreement that a man is as old, not as his heart and arteries as was once thought, but as his endocrine glands. ”

“ THE REACTIONS OF THE OTHER GLANDS As in so many other aspects, the facts about the various influences exerted by the endocrine glands upon the reproductive system are complicated and disjointed. A chink of light has been let in upon a dark cave, and slowly the chink will widen. ”

“ An explanation is an attempt at a consistent and persistent, sometimes an obstinate clarity of mind. A vast number of observations gathered by laboratory experimentalists as well as by those naturalists of the abnormal, physicians in active practice, prove that the construction of the individual both during development before maturity, and maintenance during maturity, his constitution, in short, is directed by the endocrine glands. ”

“ The parathyroid glands are probably closely concerned in regulating the retention and excretion of salts, and especially of calcium, a circumstance which becomes of significance when we remember how frequently rickety changes, tetany, and other convulsive seizures form part of the clinical picture which we are now considering. While it is difficult to determine the effect of repeated infections upon the functions of the endocrine glands, we have clear evidence of the deleterious influence upon almost all the tissues of the body, the functioning of which it is more easy to estimate. ”

“ There was something commanding about his tone as he looked from one to the other of us.
"The trouble with Miss Virginia," he added, deliberately, "seems to lie in one of what the scientists have lately designated the 'endocrine glands'—in this case the pituitary. My X-ray pictures show that conclusively.
"Let me explain for the benefit of the rest. The pituitary is an oval glandular body composed of two lobes and a connecting area, which rest in the sella turcica, enveloped by a layer of tissue, about under this point." He indicated the red spot on her forehead as he spoke. ”

“ The amount of fat deposited under the skin, for instance, is influenced by the pituitary, the thyroid, the pancreas, the liver, the adrenals and the sex glands. Other qualities, likewise, are resultants of a compromise between all the endocrine factors comprising the equation of the individual. If we are to look for unit factors at all in endocrine heredity, we must look more deeply into constitution, and measure the hormone potentials and their mobilization or suppression. ”

“ Endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases (E00-E90) All neoplasms, whether functionally active or not, are classified in Chapter 2. Appropriate codes in this chapter (i.e. E05.8, E07.0, E16-E31, E34.-) may be used as additional codes to indicate either functional activity by neoplasms and ectopic endocrine tissue or hyperfunction and hypofunction of endocrine glands associated with neoplasms and other conditions classified elsewhere. ”

“ A man's nature is essentially his endocrine nature. Primarily, when he is born, he represents a particular inherited combination of different glands of internal secretion. They, constituting the inventory of his vital stock in trade, start him in life. Afterwards, food, the routine of his existence, the accidents of experience, education, disease and misfortune, in short, environment, modify him because they modify his ductless glands and his vegetative apparatus, as well as his brain, depressing some parts, and stimulating others, and so rearranging the system. ”

“ A derangement of the endocrines has been responsible for masterpieces of the human species in the past and will be responsible for them in the future. The equality of Utopia can be the equality of the highest and fullest development possible for each of its inhabitants. The applications of endocrine control will not necessarily interfere with the life of the individual. There will be breeding of the best mixtures of glands of internal secretion possible. ”

“ But personality and its reactions, normal and abnormal, are determined by the endocrines. So we should find that particular infections run with special internal glandular predominances. For the picture presented by an infection, temperature, rash, prostration, are the details of the general reaction of the organism in the face of a new situation, the presence of a powerful, destructive invader. Information has accumulated that the invader is powerful and destructive, as well as selective, because of endocrine deficiency of one sort or another in the body it has attacked. ”

“ Let one be disturbed, and all the others will feel the impact of the disturbance and vibrate with it.
Any break in the somatic or psychic equilibrium, a blow or an infection, or a startling thing seen, or a worrisome thought felt, will start a process going. This will only wind up when every gland has been somehow touched, and a final equilibrium reestablished. The thyroid, maybe, was first excited, and then in turn the adrenals, with a boomerang reinforcing effect upon the thyroid, and at the same time a stimulating effect upon the pituitary. ”

“ SEX CRISES At the periods of interstitial cell hyperactivity, when a wave of radicalism in the blood sweeps through the tissues, the other endocrines are tested, and their latent stability or instability is made manifest. Even before puberty, cyclic variations of health and conduct may be observed in boys and girls which undoubtedly depend upon currents among the internal secretions. Children, who, in the best of circumstances, habitually are attacked by a wanderlust and run away from home, or suffer from fits of naughtiness, are samples of such endocrine lability. ”

“ What is more likely than that individuals differ in the strength of their adrenal secretion or in the readiness with which the glands are aroused to pour it out into the circulation? The excitable individual might be one with over-active adrenals. And in the same way the strenuous individual might be one with an unusually active thyroid gland, since there certainly seems to be some connection between this gland and the tendency to great activity. ”

“ No one can deny, in the face of the multitude of evidence available, that internal secretion disturbances occur in the mother, which, when grave, offer in the infant gross proof of their significance, and therefore when slight must more subtly work upon it. Endocrine disturbances in infancy have been traced to endocrine disturbances in the mother during pregnancy. 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. ”

“ Endocrine types have other tendencies, which when studied and controlled, will decimate the great assassins of middle age: heart disease and kidney disease, with accompanying degenerations of the blood vessels and circulation. The adrenocentric tends to get up a hyperacidity of the stomach and a high blood pressure, besides certain forms of diseases of the lungs. The thyrocentric is predisposed to heart disease, as well as intestinal disturbances. The pituitocentric is liable to periodic and cyclic upsets in his health. ”

“ In persons afflicted with uncontrollable impulses, the inhibiting hormones may not be present in sufficient quantity.
Feeble-mindedness, ranging from stupidity to imbecility, may also be a direct effect of insufficient endocrine supply to the brain cells. When there is not enough of the thyroid secretion in the blood, the tissue between the cells in the brain become clogged and thickened, so that a gross barrier to the passage of the nerve impulses is created. We have here an illustration of internal secretion lack actually producing gross changes in the brain. ”

“ The thyroid belongs to the class of glands known as ductless—that is, there is no canal or duct by which the secretions of the gland are carried out. Its function, like the function of the other ductless glands (the spleen, the thymus, and the adrenal bodies) , is but imperfectly understood. ”

“ The other that it is higher in the female sex than in the male. We have seen that the philosophic, scientific, intellectual mind, the capacity to abstract, and think in terms of abstractions, is definitely dependent upon proper secretion by the ante-pituitary. In woman, the post-pituitary is generally predominant over the ante-pituitary. Though we are in need of a series of studies of the endocrine traits and composition of men endowed with high imaginative qualities, and so are at a loss, we have indications of an endocrine control of the state of consciousness we speak of as the imaginative. ”

“ We know that the thyroid gland in the neck swells and contracts in very sensitive relation with the sex organs; we know that some chemical secretion from the developing embryo, or the tissue in which it grows, sends its chemical stimulus to the distant mammary glands of the mother; we know that if the ovaries of a girl or the testes of a boy are completely cut out, the far-reaching influences their hormones would have exerted are made evident by the numerous changes in the system and departures from the normal, which result from their lack. ”

“ This gland is now known to manufacture and pour out into the blood a hormone which is a regulator of metabolism. When it is produced in normal amounts, the metabolism goes on at the rate that we find in healthy people. If the gland is inactive and does not secrete enough of the hormone, there is a reduction in the metabolism. Since this implies a lowering of the vigor of the life processes, we might expect it to have important effects. The most marked of these are in the nervous system. Persons whose thyroid glands are relatively inactive are mentally sluggish ”

“ War for the soldier, or the civilian combatant as well, sets the strings vibrating, and with them the glands controlled by them. Excessive stimulation or depression of an endocrine will disturb the whole chain of hormones, and the vegetative system, and their echoes in the psyche. ”