252 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



lessness of natural selection wiping out an unadapted sport 

 denly cropping up in an environment. In prison he suffered from 

 • splitting headaches, which were probably due to changes 

 in his pituitary. Described as being directly over the eyes, 

 haunted him until his death, and may have had a good deal to 

 do with the absinthe addiction he acquired. 



The Treatment of Genius 



The problem of Oscar Wilde raises an ethical question that 

 still remains to be finally answered. Granting that all of society 

 should one day see him and his kind as a peculiar and specific 

 constitutional product of an odd intermixture of internal secre- 

 tions, what should be done with him and them? It is easy to 

 play with words like "degenerates." But still, we do not condemn 

 imbeciles, idiots or defectives, or other substandard, subnormal 

 creatures to the prisons. For the sake of the good opinion 

 society would maintain of itself, it sends the latter nowadays to 

 hospitals, sanitaria, or their equivalents, where protection for 

 itself without punishment for them may be practised. But is 

 confinement, or even treatment the solution? For we have to 

 consider what society would lose by cutting such abnormals off 

 from itself, and them from its stimulations. A number of artists 

 have been built like Oscar Wilde, musicians in particular. With- 

 out them, would there not be a great gap, a yawning absence, 

 in the world's culture? 



Modern diagnosis and modern therapy might have done a 

 great deal for Napoleon, Nietzsche, Julius Caesar, Florence Night- 

 ingale, Oscar Wilde. Were they alive today, and willing to sub- 

 mit themselves to scientific scrutiny, the X-ray would tell us 

 of the state of the pituitary and thymus in them, chemic 

 animations of the blood the condition of the thyroid and adrenals, 

 '1 investigation of the body and mind a flood of light upon 

 then nmladiei as well as their personalities. Therapy n 

 . ii of his i I so, halting I 



ing degeneration of his pitnitai terioo impossible 



have 



been « instability on the genius to his 



goal? NietZF' | have ! 



Cajsar of bii epilepsy— -but then, would not with 



the underlying streams ol ! y 00 the part of the other 



glands of the internal §* to compensate — their peculiar 



