APPLICATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES 273 



to which it will be put should be dominated by the idea of dis- 

 covering the unknown criminal predisposition. If crime is an 

 abnormality scientifically studiable and controllable like measles, 

 court procedure and prison management will have to be trans- 

 formed radically. There is scattered throughout the world now 

 a group of people who are applying medical methods to the diag- 

 nosis and treatment of crime. They are the pioneers who will 

 be remembered in history as the compeers of those who trans- 

 formed the attitudes toward insanity and its therapy. The insane 

 were once condemned and handled as criminals are in most civil- 

 ized countries yet. The criminologic laboratory as an adjunct 

 to the court of justice, like that associated with the court of 

 Chief Justice Olson in Chicago, remains to be universalized. 

 What contribution to a more rational treatment of the criminal 

 will the study of the internal secretions make? 



It has been shown that the greater number of convicts are 

 mentally and morally subnormal. To explain the subnormality, 

 the criminologist has conducted and will continue to conduct in- 

 vestigations into the heredity and early environment of the 

 criminal, his education and occupation, the social and religious 

 influences to which he was subjected, and the intelligence test 

 quotient. The conditioning of the vegetative system and the 

 endocrine status of the prisoner, however, will without a doubt 

 come to occupy the leading positions in any interpretation of 

 crime in the future. 



Introspective observation of pre-criminal states of mind by so- 

 called normal persons reveals that in many of them there is an 

 impairment of reason and will power, in others an exaltation 

 amounting almost to hysteria. What are these but endocrine 

 states of the cells, experimentally reproducible by increasing or 

 decreasing the influence of the thyroid, the adrenals, the pitui- 

 tary? Crimes of passion may be traced in no small part to dis- 

 turbances of the thyroid. A psychologic examiner of a Pittsburgh 

 court, interested in the subject, has found an enlarged thyroid in 

 over ninety per cent of delinquent girls. Similarly, crimes of vio- 

 lence may be ascribed to a profound break in the adrenal 

 equilibrium. Criminal tendencies in women during menstruation 

 and pregnancy, periods of deep-seated mutation in the internal 

 glandular system, have long been noted. A kleptomania, uncon- 

 trollable desire to steal, confined to the duration of pregnancy 

 alone, has been described. We have seen how the thymocentric, 

 especially if he possesses a small bony case for his pituitary, is 



