APPLICATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES 269 



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 organ- 

 ism in the face of a new situation, the presence of a powerful, 

 destructive invader. Information has accumulated that the in- 

 vader is powerful and destructive, as well as selective, because 

 of endocrine deficiency of one sort or another in the body it has 

 attacked. Work of a number of investigators has indicated that 

 an individual's susceptibility or its reverse, resistance, is inti- 

 mately subjected to the derangements or harmonies of the en- 

 docrine system. 



Comparison of the endocrine type and the disease assaulting 

 has yielded an even more interesting principle. Knowing the 

 state of the internal secretion reservoirs enables us to predict the 

 liability to certain of these infections of childhood. Diphtheria 

 has been found to occur most virulently among adrenal poor in- 

 dividuals. Moreover, they are left poorer in adrenal afterwards. 

 It follows that they would be assisted by the feeding of adrenal. 

 Mumps is a sickness that sometimes permanently injures the 

 gonads: the testes or ovaries. The thyroid dominant, whose 

 system is rich in thyroid, will rarely suffer from any of the com- 

 mon diseases of children— if at all, from measles. On the other 

 hand, those who have every infection of the period, and who, as 

 their mothers say, seem to get everything, are those whose sys- 

 tem is thyroid poor. Thyroid poverty is a splendid enticement 

 to the universal microbe. The thymocentric stands all diseases 

 poorly. The pituitary type is more liable to epidemic meningitis 

 and infantile paralysis, typhoid and scarlet fever. 



The public health officer of the future will be armed with a 

 new weapon in his fight against the spread of an epidemic. He 

 will be able to classify the endocrine traits of the population 

 exposed, and to advise a course of glandular feeding for the types 

 specially liable. The Schick test for diphtheria susceptibility is 

 an illustration of one method of approach to the problem of the 

 epidemiologist in settling who needs protection. The endocrines 

 will assist him in the great body of diseases for which no im- 

 munity test is at hand. Should another influenza epidemic come 

 along, for instance, the proper handling, from the endocrine stand- 

 point, of the thymocentrics and the related adrenocentrics would 

 help considerably in lowering the mortality. 



Endocrine types have other tendencies, which when studied and 



