Cretins*

When books are reprinted, it is because their first editions were amusing, illuminative, significant or fascinating. Within the last fortnight, the Macmillan Co. reprinted The Glands Regulating Personality, by Louis Berman, M.D., Associate in Biological Chemistry at Columbia University. This book was first published in 1921, when professional respect for endocrinology still hovered in skeptical abeyance; and when popular acceptance of one of the Century's more important revelations did not proceed much farther than the glandular jokes to be heard on Broadway.

Currently, Dr. Berman's book is received with more intelligence. Publicists, parents and practitioners have been educated, in their respective planes of understanding, to look upon endocrinology as important, intimate, significant. When Dr. Berman describes the cretin, his hideous characteristics and precarious destiny, he is now sure of an attentive audience. When he elucidates the cures that have been wrought upon the cretin, he is now certain that society appreciates while applauding, and that medicos share his enthusiasm as well as his awe.

Few towns and villages have not their broken ragpicker, their derelict mower of lawns or sweeper of streets-- belly lurched out in a flabby bag, neck narrow and bowed to an ugly vertebrate knuckle, legs short and wobbly, feet flat and weak, head huge and misshapen, with drooling mouth, bleary, vacant eye, putty nose and unkempt thatch of hair. He is the "village idiot," the Tom o' Bedlam of an earlier day. His condition is answered for nowadays by Science as resulting from deficiency of the thyroid gland--a small vesicle in the neck that secretes a fluid essential to the vital development of nearly every part of the human organism. "Hands and feet are broad, pudgy and floppy; the fingers stiff, square and spadelike; the toes spread apart, like a duck's, by the solid skin. . . . Even the intelligence common to the higher animals is wanting. The cretins of the 'human plant' kind, as they have been nicknamed, will not recognize mother nor father nor any person about them, nor even a person from an object. . . . Hunger and thirst they manifest by grunts and inarticulate sounds or by screaming."

Such are the cretins. But how few, suggests Dr. Berman, are aware of the transformation that has been wrought upon these wretches by modern Science. By furnishing the hormones, or vital gland secretion, in pill form, manufactured from the thyroid extract of animals, the village idiot has been reclaimed in thousands of cases. He (or she) rides on the trolley and subway beside you. He works at the next desk, exercises at the next machine, pours tea at any table, walks, talks, transacts, marries, yet is never detected unless somehow cut off, Antaeus-like, from the source of vitality. Cretins must continue their diurnal gland reinforcement or sink back to their deformed, subconscious state by slow, tragic degrees.

Dr. Berman carries his fluent discourse into the foundations of normal humanity, elucidating the roles played in the body's character and development by the other ductless glands--the pituitary, adrenal, thymus glands and the gonads. He pictures the glands as an "interlocking directorate," traces the mechanics of masculine and feminine, the rhythms of sex, the backgrounds of personality. He proposes that "the individual is what his internal secretions make him."

*The origin of cretin is traced by some to the French chretien, meaning "Christian," hence "innocent." The Latin Christianus, again, was probably a translation of the older cretin, from crete (craie), a. chalky fuller's earth found in Crete, used by the Romans for coloring the face, especially by actors. A common mark of cretinism is a sallow, yellow earthy complexion.