By Nordlund, Christer
Abstract.
In the first half of the twentieth century, hormones took pride of place as life’s master molecules and the endocrinologist took precedence over the geneticist as the scientist offering the means to control life. But, as with molecular genetics and biotechnology today, the status of endocrinology was not based solely on contemporary scientific and medical practices. To a high degree it was also reliant on expectations or visions of what endocrinologists would soon be able to do. Inspired by the approach of social studies of techno-scientific expectations, the aim of this article is to explore some of the great expectations connected to the development of endocrinology in the 1930s. The analysis is based on popular books written by the American physician and endocrinologist Louis Berman. The paper argues that Berman thought not only that it was perfectly possible to understand human nature through hormone analysis but that endocrinologists would be able to control, design and ‘improve’ humans by using hormone replacement therapy. Furthermore, in contrast to most of the eugenics of his time, Berman suggested that the whole population of the world should be improved. As a political activist he wanted to contribute to the development of new human beings, ‘ideal normal persons’, thereby reaching an ‘ideal society’. That HRT could involve risks was something that he seems not to have taken into account.
Our age is characterized by enormous expectations invested in the so-called ‘new biology’. These expectations concern not only detailed academic knowledge about the mechanism of life and the function and behaviour of living organisms, but also the possibilities of revolutionary medical treatments, social and environmental applications and financial profit. These prospects for the social significance of science have been formulated by journalists, authors, politicians, businessmen and economists, as well as by biologists themselves. One of the most renowned interpreters of the potential of biotechnology, Princeton molecular biologist Lee M. Silver, has spoken of the possibility of actively directing evolution with biological engineering, gene therapy and cloning, thereby ‘recreating Eden’.1
Such expectations are not new. The discourse on the significance of experimental biology has always been oriented towards the future rather than the present.* In other words, claims have dealt not so much with the actual practices of biology but rather with the possible consequences of these practices ‘in the near future’.3 In a historic perspective, furthermore, it is easy to see that a significant number of the expectations expressed have in fact been forms of speculative scientific and technological optimism. This makes them no less important or less interesting. As researchers in the field of social studies of techno-scientific expectations have indicated, scientific expectations, regardless of how speculative they may be, ought not to be seen as ephemeral or irrelevant but as fundamental for the development of research and production of knowledge. The simple theoretical point of departure for this approach is that visions and socially constructed futures contribute to legitimizing claims, mobilizing financial resources, forming networks and thereby urging science in certain directions and away from others.4 Studying the actors and institutions that are granted interpretative authority in the struggle to stake out the future prospects for science thus emerges as a central task for both current and future research as well as for historical studies.
The purpose of the present article is to investigate a classic prospective theme in the history of scientific ideas : the idea that through scientific means it is possible and desirable to improve the nature of mankind and thereby society. As most scholars are well aware, this idea is an ancient one, already put forth in Plato’s Republic: Socrates and the Athenian Glaucon discuss the possibility of breeding virtuous citizens through controlled mating. Since then the idea has recurred in various guises and in various contexts, most famously in the form of heredity research and racial hygiene during the decades around 1900.5 Eugenics in its various forms from Francis Gallon to early human genetics has attracted much attention in the literature of the history of science and ideas. This history has also been linked to the post-war debate on the presumed pros and cons of molecular genetics and biotechnology.8
Modern scientists who have expressed hopes about the ability of experimental biology to improve the nature of mankind and society have as a rule focused on mankind’s genetic make-up. Many can be categorized as ‘scientists of heredity’. But they are not alone in expressing such expectations. In what follows, I shall argue that even the early researchers in endocrinology insisted that in the very near future they would be able both to control and to improve human nature with the aid of hormone analysis and hormone therapy.7 Considering the status of endocrinology after the discovery and successful application of insulin in 1923, this attitude was hardly absurd. Endocrinology, or ‘the New Physiology’ as the British physiologist Edward Schafer (after 1918 Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer) dubbed the field, was undeniably on the cutting edge of research in the life sciences.8 As the historian Nicolas Rasmussen has put it, ‘ in the first half of the twentieth century, hormones took pride of place as life’s master molecules, and the endocrinologist took precedence over the geneticist as the scientist offering the means to control life’.9 However, this status had as much to do with expectations as with actual medical practice.
In contrast to the promises of heredity research, the visionary aspect of endocrinology has not been much studied.10 While the history of hormone research and hormone replacement therapy has been treated in a series of works, its historiography has mainly been characterized by gender and queer theory analyses of sexual endocrinology’s development, including reproductive biology.11 Considering the influence which the ideas and practices of sexual endocrinology have had and still have today, this is a highly relevant area of study. But the history of endocrinology is about much more than sex glands and sexual hormones. Inspired by Julia Rechter’s 1997 doctoral dissertation ‘The glands of destiny’,12 the present paper attempts to foreground and analyse one of the foremost visionaries of early endocrinology, Louis Berman. Louis Berman is not one of the central figures in the standard history of modern life sciences. However, for his contemporaries he was a renowned physician and researcher at Columbia University in New York City. He earned his scientific status through some forty scientific articles in medical journals, though he achieved his fame through a series of comprehensive and popular monographs on the significance of hormone research for mankind and for society.
This paper provides a brief biography of Berman and his visionary work. It attempts to answer the following questions: what were the possibilities Berman considered endocrinology as having and how did he motivate these expectations ? What view of mankind is reflected in his arguments about these possibilities ? What were the central ideas inspiring Berman? What risks, if any, did Berman see in the application of hormone research ? Berman’s early books will be touched upon, but the paper principally proceeds from an analysis of New Creations in Human Beings (1938), against the background of the status of endocrinology in inter-war America.18 This book is barely granted any scientific value today, nor is it considered a pioneering work in endocrinology. But it is of historical interest, since with its aid one can isolate some of the grand expectations and visions articulated in the early days of endocrinology, which are now all but forgotten in contemporary discourse on biotechnology.
Biological experiments and organ therapy
The latter half of the nineteenth century has been described as the epoch when biology or physiology as the story of life began to converge, both in theory and in practice, with medicine as the story of disease and its treatment. One of many common denominators facilitating their integration was laboratory experimental work on ‘the chemistry of life ‘, including the study of the so-called ‘ internal secretion ‘ of the body.14 The concept of internal secretion, attributed to Claude Bernard, referred to the discovery that certain organs of the body produced chemical substances which directly entered the bloodstream.18 Knowledge of the internal secretion implied a somewhat novel view of human health and physiology. From the period of Rudolf Virchow, physiological study of the body and the central functions of life had revolved around the relation between the brain, the nervous system and the cells. Studied assiduously ever since the seventeenth century, the glands were also considered as being guided by the electrical impulses of the nerves. This outlook now began to be broadened by researchers who argued that life, like a ser\ies of illnesses, could not be explained satisfactorily unless one also considered the influence exercised by the internal secretion of the glands on the organism and its biological development. This was the development which Edward Schafer later interpreted as a shift from the Old Physiology’ to the ‘New Physiology’.16 The manner in which the mutual relationship between the ‘electric’ nervous system and the ‘chemical’ internal secretion system was to be understood provoked debate, but many then agreed that the two systems functioned in entirely different ways.
A series of valuable results concerning the functions and diseases of the glands were achieved, and alongside traditional surgery the removal of ovaries, new types of experiments with glandular extracts and transplantation of glandular tissue were performed.” Thus the study of internal secretion gradually moved from the clinic to the laboratory at the same time as collaboration between clinics and laboratories began.18 Soon the nascent pharmaceutical industry also became an important partner in the glandular enterprise.19
The best known of these early attempts at manipulating internal secretion was the remarkable experiment with testicular extract taken from young dogs and guinea pigs performed in the 188Os by French physiologist and neurologist Charles-Edouard Brown-Squard, initially on rabbits and subsequently on himself.20 Brown-Squard insisted that the injection of these extracts produced a strengthening and vitalizing effect and, conversely, that disease could occur if the body’s own internal secretion abated. Glandular experiments performed in the German-speaking world around the turn of the century are also well known. One of the foremost figures was the physiologist Eugen Steinach, who began his career in Prague before moving to Vienna. There in 1912 he became chairman of the physiology department at the Institute of Experimental Biology. Like Brown-Squard, Steinach nurtured a vision of being able to vitalize and rejuvenate ageing men. However, his methods did not mainly involve injections of glandular extract but rather the performance of glandular operations.*1 The results of these complicated and highly risky experiments were hard to evaluate but drew a great deal of attention.22
Physicians and respected medical journals in late Victorian Britain displayed scepticism toward these Continental experiments on rejuvenation. They proclaimed that this type of organ therapy displayed palpable elements of quackery, was probably ineffectual and at worst could be harmful. In the meantime British physiologists themselves searched for internal secretions in other organs. At University College London (UCL) in the 1890s systematic studies aimed at discovering the physiological and pharmacological effects of organ extracts were undertaken. Injections of secretions from the thyroid gland and pancreas were tried as therapy against myxoedema and diabetes respectively. Great expectations were also directed at the secretion of the adrenal gland marrow, which in animal experiments showed extraordinarily powerful effects.23 The substance, first produced in New York in 1901, was christened adrenalin (epinephrine in the United States) and has since been considered the first chemically isolated hormone.24
Through similar biological experiments and organ therapy, together with the furore and the expectations they roused, the idea that the products of internal secretion could be used as potent medicines was established. As part of a simultaneous conceptual development in the field, terms such as ‘hormone’, ‘endocrine’ and ‘endocrinology’ became part of the vocabulary of the new physiology. The word hormone, the name for the chemical messenger of the body, originated from the Greek verb hormao, meaning ‘set in motion, urge on, stimulate’. It is usually credited to Edward Schafer’s UCL successor, the physiologist Ernest Starling. In 1905 Starling defined ‘hormone’ as a chemical substance produced in one of the organs of the body and transported via the blood to cause some form of reaction in another part of the body. This wideranging field of knowledge, research and treatment consisting of studies of the internal secretions of the glands and influence of hormones on biological development, health and disease was given the name ‘endocrinology’.25
Early endocrinology in the US: towards a holistic materialism
Even though physiological research into internal secretion was first conducted and defined in Europe, it was in North America that endocrinology had its greatest impact. There it became a popular field with a rapidly growing number of adherents, many of whom were specialists in biochemistry. The same pattern appears in the more spectacular treatment methods, such as rejuvenation therapy. While the leading rejuvenation theoreticians first emerged in Europe, they found their most enthusiastic audience in North America.2* Significant scientific discoveries were also made in North America during those years, including the isolation of insulin, achieved through close collaboration between laboratory researchers, clinics and pharmaceutical companies in Canada and the US. Insulin was standardized and quickly introduced into medical practice, becoming the most brilliant medical success in early endocrinology, its discovery awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923.27
With a few exceptions, the breakthrough of endocrinology was not celebrated by the creation of new professorial chairs, academic institutions or medical clinics. There was neither the creation of a discipline nor medical specialization as commonly understood. On the other hand a multidisciplinary association, the Association for the Study of the Internal secretions (ASIS, after 1952 the Endocrine Society) was established in New York City in 1917. The association was founded by physicians and biologists who worked in the United States, but functioned for a long time as an international organization.28 As the introduction to the first issue of the association’s official house organ, Endocrinology, made plain, optimism within the new association was high: ‘the nature of the ductless glands, previously obscure, has been recognized; and the new principle of a regulation and correlation of the functions of the different bodily organs by “chemical messengers”, or “hormones” (in addition to the earlier recognized principle of nervous regulation), has been generally accepted’.29 When the ASIS was founded, three hundred individuals applied for membership and within a few years it boasted almost 1,200 members.30 A European counterpart did not emerge until after the Second World War.31
Yet it should be recalled that endocrinology was still highly controversial when the ASIS was created.32 The fact that many researchers and physicians as well as businessmen and patients were attracted to endocrinology did not imply that there were no antagonists and sceptics. Boundary struggles between different professions were normal; debates on dubious vitalization treatments regularly flared up.83 Early organ therapy had been branded quackery and many reckoned hormone therapy, exploited by the ‘endocriminologists’, was not much better.34 Few hormonal or glandular preparations with palpable effect had been introduced before 1917.38
The continued development of endocrinology in 1920s America has been much studied. There is a consensus that a general model for ‘the regulation of mankind’ was established during this period and that according to this model the sex glands were the most significant internal secretary organ. The sex glands were seen not only as necessary for reproduction and the entire biological process, from embryonic development via puberty to menopause, but also as controlling male and female behaviour.36 Thus the sex glands were called the ‘master glands’ of the endocrine system. In order to assure the continued development of knowledge in the field, the Rockefeller Foundation channelled funds to a number of hormone researchers at different universities via the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (CRPS), established by the National Research Council in New York City in 1921. At the end of the 1920s researchers from within this organization succeeded in producing the internal secretions of the sex glands, the chemical substances which came to be known under the general rubrics of ‘male’ and ‘female’ sexual hormones.87 Sex hormones were also isolated and produced in Europe. Important work was conducted, for example, in the Netherlands, through cooperation between the Organon company and Ernst Laqueur’s research group at the University of Amsterdam, and in Germany, through cooperation between the Schering company and Adolf Butenandt’s research group at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fr Biochemie.38
Ideas about sex hormones still exercise considerable influence on views of the body, gender, behaviour and cognitive ability; it is therefore worth attending to the special status the sex glands were granted in the 1920s. But it should be noted that the internal secretions of other known glands were also considered important. Moreover, it was not long before researchers in the US shifted their focus from the functions of single glands to the interplay between glands. The holistic model subsequently developed declared that it was the collective functions of the glands which, together with the nervous system, directed human biological processes and thus life itself. In order to describe hormones’ intricate cooperation a simile was employed during the 1930s: the endocrine system functioned like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Like other orchestras, it had a conductor, but now it was no longer the sex glands which held the baton but rather the pituitary gland.89
Endocrinology aroused many and varied reactions and expectations, not only those related to sex and reproduction. In 1922 in Scientific Monthly, \the periodical of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the well-known science popularizer Edwin E. Slosson stated that ‘ a few years ago, psychoanalysis was all the rage. Now endocrinology is coming into fashion. Those who recently were reading Freud and Jung have now taken up with Berman and Harrow’.40 This comparison between psychoanalysis and endocrinology might now seem far-fetched but was then perfectly understandable. The glandular juices were seen to exercise a palpable influence over both body and soul. As Slosson explained, ‘these Hormones determine our temper and our temperament. They decide whether or not we shall be tall or short, thick or thin, stupid or clever. They mould our features and control our characters’.41
From the idea that endocrinologists could explain how the body and psyche functioned, the next step was the idea that these experts could also adjust and design these biochemical functions through so- called ‘hormone therapy’. Some, like Benjamin Harrow, claimed that endocrinology could explain the basic processes of life and cure innumerable illnesses.42 The other person mentioned by Slosson, Louis Berman, had ideas as to how endocrinology would furthermore be able both to explain and to change the behaviour of individuals and by extension ‘ refine ‘ mankind. For these researchers it was hormones, not chromosomes nor genes, which represented the greatest opportunity to achieve health, happiness and welfare.
In North America endocrinology broke through accepted disciplinary and medical frameworks, as well as transgressing the boundary between academic and public. Suddenly one could read about hormones everywhere, not just in academic dissertations. A number of popular texts were published in periodicals such as Scientific American and Saturday Evening Post. The New York Times published over one hundred articles on endocrinological subjects during the 1920s. The new knowledge was also disseminated and interpreted in novels, plays, movies and radio programmes. As Julia Rechter has put it, ‘hormones, in the 1920s, were everywhere and could do anything’.48 One might perhaps also say that the view of the possibilities of endocrinology was extraordinarily visionary in North America. In what follows, these visions are made concrete in the case of the work of Louis Berman.
Louis Berman: interpreter of the glands
Louis Berman (1893-1946) was born in New York City, where he grew up, went to school and eventually spent most of his life working as an experimental and clinical endocrinologist.44 He received his MD from Columbia University in 1915, then spent several years working as a physician at the city’s Mount Sinai Hospital. In 1921 he established his own laboratory where he conducted his practice specializing in endocrinology. The same year he became a teacher at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, with the biochemical specialization typical of the era. After a period spent visiting hospitals and research laboratories in Paris, Berlin and Vienna in 1922 and 1923, he returned to New York and Columbia, where he started what has been called the world’s first course in hormone chemistry for doctors. After 1928, when he resigned his chair, Berman did most of his research and clinical work in his private laboratory.
Situating Berman within a coherent research tradition or discipline is not easy. He is perhaps best seen as a clinical practitioner and researcher who worked at the intersection between chemistry, physiology, psychology and internal medicine. Berman’s research dealt with both the chemistry of the hormones and their influence on health. For example, he isolated the secretions of the parathyroid glands, studied the ovaries and the adrenal gland and sought to find the endocrine cause of breast cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Some of his essays on parathyroid gland extract (parathyrin) have become classics in the history of endocrinology.45 But he was also deeply interested in the influence of the endocrine glands on human behaviour and cognitive ability, an area of research which he introduced in the periodical Science in 1928 under a name he coined himself. ? propose the word “psycho-endocrinology” as the name for that branch of science which deals with the relation of the endocrine glands to mental activities and processes, as well as to behaviour, including the individual characteristics in health and disease, summarized in the term personality.’46 One may note that a very similar concept – ‘psycho-biology’ – was used several years later in 1933, when the Rockefeller Foundation launched its well- known programme on ‘ Science of Man ‘. In that programme, endocrinology also had its place as a subfield.47
Berman was convinced of a causal correlation between the ‘personality’ of an individual and the internal secretion produced by their endocrine glands. The investigation of this correlation and thereby the explanation of human nature in chemical formulae, ‘the chemistry of the soul’, was in his estimation one of the foremost tasks of endocrinology. He had already treated the theme in his first book, The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature (1921), which became a much-discussed best-seller, published in four editions by 1935.48 As indicated by the subtitle, Berman proposed that human beings be categorized in various types, so-called ‘master types’, according to their respective endocrinal complexion. Thus there were those who were thyroid gland-centred, pituitary gland- centred, adrenal gland-centred and so on.49 Endocrinal differences were said to exist between individuals, but they also worked on a higher collective level, most fundamentally distinguishing between men and women, but also between different races. As Berman put it,
the white man possesses more of pituitary, adrenal, gonad, and thyroid internal secretions as compared with the yellow man or the black man. And since these endocrines control not only physique and physiognomy, anatomic and functional minutiae, but also mind and behaviour, we are justified in putting down the white man’s predominance on the planet to a greater allaround concentration in his blood of the omnipotent hormones.50
With the new knowledge of the nature of humans, a knowledge undeniably resembling aspects of the ancient teachings of humoral pathology, Berman judged that enormous new opportunities were opened. By controlling the chemistry of the soul, researchers could eventually control and even improve human nature.51 Humanity could thereby influence evolution and become the architect of its own fate. In Berman’s own words, ‘we have learned how to control and change our environment. We are now learning, endocrine research is now discovering, how to control and change ourselves’.82 However, he reassured his readers, much research was yet to be done before the goal could be attained. Two years later, such visions would recur in J. B. S. Haldane’s famously visionary work Daedalus, or Science and the Future.53
The Glands Regulating Personality was followed by The Personal Equation (1925), where several of Berman’s previous hypotheses recurred.54 However, he now added a new aspect to the interpretation of mankind’s personality : facial studies. Similar studies were conducted during the nineteenth century under the name of physiognomy. But according to Berman that practice, drawing conclusions about an individual’s nature by measuring the angles and forms of the head, was nothing more than a pseudoscientific system of guesses. On the other hand, he proposed a relation between the faces of individuals and their internal secretions : an individual’s endocrinal situation was reflected in their face. Thus by studying the face it would be possible to diagnose humanity’s ‘glandular make- up’ and thereby its personality.55
Berman applied his psycho-endocrinological template to many different areas. In the late 1920s he began a three-year study of 250 inmates at Sing Sing prison. In contrast to physical anthropologists like Cesare Lombroso, who searched for the Homo criminalis by measuring the form of human heads, Berman attempted to find the endocrinal foundation of criminality. The prisoners were put through physical and chemical examinations of their blood hormone levels, metabolism and nerve reactions, which showed the presence of ‘endocrinal defects’ two to three times greater than in the control group. He concluded that hormones were of fundamental significance for the emergence of criminal behaviour and also that certain types of crime were associated with certain types of endocrine malfunction.56 Another of Berman’s works, his Study of Relation of Ductless Glands to Homosexuality (1933), dealt with a related theme.57 In his understanding of human nature, Berman thus formulated an alternative not only to current physical anthropology but also to psychoanalysis, which during the 1920s had enjoyed a breakthrough in the United States, especially in New York. Berman was sceptical of psychoanalysis and also very critical of the claims of behaviourism, an attitude that he explained in his book The Religion Called Behaviourism (1927).
Through his books, Berman’s name became associated with the most visionary and public side of endocrinology. He has also been described as a ‘premier hormone advocate’.58 Berman was of course subjected to criticism, but he was certainly not perceived as a dangerous quack. While he was not quite a member of the scientific elite, evidence suggests he was well respected in both academic and medical circles. He was among the founders of the New York Endocrinology Society, for whom he undertook numerous tasks at the behest of the board, and spent some time as editor of the section on endocrinology in the Journal of Medical Practice. He was also elected to several learned societies, includi\ng the ASIS, the AAAS, the American Medical Association and the American Chemical Society.
It is interesting that Berman, whose parents were second- generation Jewish immigrants from Russia, was also active in, and in 1942 and 1943 chairman of, the theosophically inspired All Nations Commission for World Unity.59 That Berman did not eschew matters of a more ethical or metaphysical nature is revealed clearly in his final book, Behind the Universe: A Doctor’s Religion (1943), whose grandiose aim was to link together a ‘universal science’ with a ‘universal religion’, thereby summarizing the ‘meaning of life’.60 This commitment to world peace, solidarity and internationalism must be kept in mind in order to understand Berman’s ideas about the possibilities of endocrinology expressed in New Creations in Human Beings.
Hormone visions: new creations in human beings
On one level, Louis Berman’s New Creations in Human Beings can be described as a synthesis of knowledge in endocrinology during the 1930s. Berman discusses the basic physiology of human beings, the function of the endocrine glands and interplay between them, their hormone production and the diseases and other problems associated with them. The text is garnished with illustrative laboratory experiments and case descriptions, many from Berman’s own practice. It is written in a popular style, avoids scientific formulae and other technical terminology and lacks footnotes or a bibliography. But even if the book is largely descriptive, it is neither a handbook nor popular science in the traditional meaning of the terms; it is not a book whose purpose is to present established rather than new knowledge.61 Berman writes like an endocrinologist, but an endocrinologist who has assumed the mantle of a world citizen criticizing civilization.
New Creations in Human Beings can be understood as a summary of Berman’s previous books, from The Glands Regulating Personality onwards, including his major work on nutrition, Food and Character (1933). At the same time, it is an attempt to analyse the cultural and social significance such knowledge would involve were it broadly implemented. In other words, it is a contribution to a debate written in professional prose, a dedicated contribution to the public sphere on the role of the new physiology and ultimately on the condition and future of the world. Through his public engagement, Berman is related to the group of American researchers who actively worked Outside the laboratory’ during the 1930s, researchers who have been called ‘political activists’ by historian Peter J. Kuznick.62 Political activism is not necessarily synonymous with political radicalism, even if many of the researchers mentioned by Kuznick were ideologically located on the left. Rather, it refers to researchers who actively took a stand and dedicated themselves to the social significance of science, thereby breaking with the perception that science ought to be neutral and separate from society at large.63 It is probable that the very title of Berman’s book is a paraphrase of Luther Burbank’s New Creations in Fruits and Flowers (1893). Burbank, a plantbreeder, speaks of how he succeeded in creating hundreds of new fruits and flowers for the good of mankind by very simple means.64 Berman felt that it was time to take a step forward in humanity’s guidance of evolution.
Berman’s view of man
With grimmest examples from the history of Western civilization, Berman portrays mankind as grossly unfortunate and inferior beings, absurd and destructive failures who still, after thousands of years of civilization, appear to stay the same. ‘In spite of all the conditionings and gentlings of the numerous generations of his domestication he remains the same predatory destroyer, the same blundering muddler, the same instinct-driven, hysterically stampeding, crowd infectible, mechanically enslavable juvenile of the ages that he has always been.’65 This problematic situation concerning mankind’s nature is further reinforced by the destructive and degenerative effect which modern highly organized mass society exercises on the organism. ‘The complications of mass civilizations are eroding the very fiber of the reproductive vigor of the human race.’66 Berman warns that a weak ‘internal environment’ in combination with a threatening ‘external environment’ will unavoidably lead to a collapse threatening finally to exterminate mankind as a species. Collective madness is close at hand; the spectre of total annihilation is at the door.
Berman’s rhetoric and gloomy analysis of the world can be understood against the backdrop of the First World War, economic depression, imperialism, burgeoning anti-Semitism and the spread of totalitarian regimes in Europe. He allies himself with many other writers, philosophers and scientists who, after the horrors of the war, began to doubt the idea of progress and modern civilization. Some of these cultural critics, including Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane, called for a science which actively contributed to the creation of a new and better world for the ‘man of tomorrow’.67 In the United States partial agreement was reached that the scientist had a duty to attack social problems with his potent scientific method.68 Berman also rejected the idea of automatic progress, though without rejecting progress as a possibility. At the same time as he allied himself with pessimistic doomsday prophets such as Oswald Spengler, he was a genuine optimist about science and technology. Berman stated that mankind could survive as a species, evolve and create a better world – as long as it took command of its own biological evolution. This is where hormone therapy enters the account.
Berman’s argument about the struggle between mankind’s internal and external environments, between stability and instability, harked back to Claude Bernard, but probably also to the Harvard physiologist Walter B. Cannon, during Berman’s lifetime one of the leading figures in both the ASIS and the CRPS. During the First World War Cannon had performed research on the phenomena of stress and shock, then produced a theory of the relation between hormones, nerves and emotions published in Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (1917).69 This was later developed into a holistic, materialistic approach to the body’s ability through self- regulation mechanisms to maintain a dynamic physiological balance in the internal environment, such as oxygen, salt and sugar levels in the blood. This ability, ‘homeostasis’, is treated extensively in The Wisdom of the Body (1932).70 In the book’s epilogue, ‘Relations of biological and social homeostasis’, Cannon draws a parallel between biology and society and between body and politics. He claimed that by studying the techniques which maintain the body’s internal stability, we can discover general principles of how society and the economy ought to be organized. External stable security, a social homeostasis, would then be achievable.71 Whether Berman thought that society could be modelled in accordance with the physiology of the body is impossible to say. Rather, he meant that the macrocosm was a reflection of the microcosm. He seems to have been convinced that a well-functioning society free from war and from the abuse of power, beyond American capitalism and Soviet communism, could not exist before the existence of biologically ‘elevated’ individuals. Berman foresaw that once mankind had evolved appropriately, it could in itself fulfil the role of the social body’s stabilizing hormones.
What, then, is a biologically elevated human? What does perfect human nature imply? Berman’s answer is the ‘Ideal Normal’ human. It is not easy to understand exactly what this means, since Berman proceeds more from an abstract idea than from a finished product. But it is clear that the ideal normal human not only is medically healthy and sound, but also possesses specific qualities of appearance, behaviour and mental capacity. Berman exemplifies this with the products of successful animal breeding. ‘The blue-ribbon animals among the various ones domesticated by Man, those who win prizes at the shows, correspond indeed in their superiority to the patterns of the ideal normal for their own species.’72 The ideal normal is thus different from the Statistically Normal; the former is in fact Statistically Abnormal. The ideal normal ranks well above the average in features that earn social standing, but not so much as to appear freakish. This is no Nietzschean superman, but rather a versatile perfect uomo universelle. At the same time, the transformative process would not lead to a general standardization so that all humanity would become identical. The vision was not that of Aldous Huxley’s dystopic Brave New World (1932). Just as many new variants could be produced through plant and animal breeding, so it ought to be possible from the perspective of each person’s individual preconditions to produce a variety of ideal normals. Berman thus imagines the possibility of a series of ideal types with different variations.
The possibilities of endocrinology
What kind of problem could emerge because of a ‘disturbance of the hormonal balance ‘ and what could hormone therapy change? This is not the place to discuss all of the problems, diagnoses and treatment to which Berman refers. But they can be summarized under six somewhat overlapping categories of treatment.73 Each deals with the cure of what Berman and many of his contemporaries considered conditions of endocrinal disease and also with the development of normally healthy people into ideal normals: a ‘pursuit of perfection’.74
The first technique deals with the influence of hormones on physique and beauty. Hormones could be used to form an ideally normal build with a good physique and aesthetically attractive harmonious facial features. Such biochemical bodybuilding woul\d perhaps mainly be prescribed for those suffering from being overweight or from under-nourishment, for dwarves or giants. It is reminiscent of latter-day hormonal doping. The second area, vitality and energy, deals with the significance of hormones for life energy, including level of creativity, stamina, immunity, libido, craving for experiences and appetite for life. Life force is said largely to depend on the composition of nutrition, of sugar, protein and vitamins, but a balanced access to the primary ‘energy catalysts’ thyroxin, adrenalin, cortin and sex hormones is also necessary. Through the injection of these hormones individuals could change significantly, according to Berman, from exhausted slackers to potent ‘Mussolini types’, or what he saw as other ideally normal personalities.
The third field consists of the influence of hormones on intelligence and imagination. This is the area most obviously related to the vision of social homeostasis. Berman held that phenomena such as serfdom and gangsterism, feudalism and slavery, and ultimately war, flow from humanity’s generally low level of theoretical, practical and social intelligence. The deception and enslavement of the oppressed masses have physiological grounds, and these can be influenced. With the appropriate hormone therapy, the level of intelligence of morons, idiots, the power-mad and generally antisocial individuals, as well as mentally normal individuals, can be raised significantly. This would be economically, socially and spiritually valuable both for themselves and for society. Human intuition, empathy and artistic imagination ultimately depend on the chemistry of the body and could be developed through hormone therapy for the good of civilization. Unhealthy stimuli otherwise employed to free the imagination, like alcohol, opium and mescaline, could thereby be rendered obsolete.
For Berman, sexuality and maturity comprise another central area for endocrinology.75 This includes the entire reproductive process but also sex hormones’ significance in the development of secondary sexual characteristics, said to cause differentiation between men and women. This area was far from unproblematic. During the 1930s it became clear that both men and women produce male and female sex hormones. The endocrinological boundary between masculine and feminine became permeable. Manliness and womanliness were now a question of hormone quantity. This quantity began to be measured in order to determine the correct balance. Since endocrinologists considered the balance between the different hormones easy to disturb, the sexual situation became uncertain.76 Thus, according to Berman, to ensure the survival of sexual attraction and to prevent sterility, it was necessary to exercise constant control and modification. Hormone therapy would thus be able to produce ideally male and ideally female individuals, as well as cure the infantile, the sterile, sexual deviants and generally perverse individuals, such as homosexuals.77
The fifth area, ageing and the rejuvenation of vitality, is in principle a continuation of Steinach’s rejuvenation ideas, a source which Berman indirectly acknowledges. The difference is that Berman prescribes modern hormone therapy instead of gland operations.78 But for Berman it is not only a question of providing temporary sexual rejuvenation with hormone treatment, but literally of introducing a new cycle of maturation and thereby moving the entire menopause forward. In accordance with 1930s American endocrinology, Berman speaks of both a female and a male menopause represented by the recession of sexual powers and functions but also by a comprehensive change in all bodily organs including the brain. A shift forward of menopause implies in turn a prolongation of life. According to Berman, the glands involved had already been localized and it would only be a matter of time before their functions could be harnessed.79
The sixth and final area involves a reconstruction of the morbid. This is partly related to intelligence enhancement techniques, but aims at the treatment of people with more specific psycho- endocrinological conditions. Berman cites examples of ‘morbidity’ such as criminals, the insane, psychopaths, eccentrics, schizophrenics, compulsive and sexual neurotics, alcoholics and melancholies. He discusses the relationship between ‘asocial behaviour’ and psychological, social and economic factors and does not doubt that such variables have certain significance in the context; just how great an influence, however, he does not dare speculate. The internal factors of secretion, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter, since their significance is already scientifically determined.80 Morbid individuals are therefore perfect objects for regenerative hormone therapy which, according to Berman, actually works in practice, in contrast to psychoanalysis and other alleged pseudo-sciences. If the public were simply to accept this new knowledge, conditions such as alcoholism could be cured as easily as the commonest complaints.
Endocrinology as a ‘third way’ of eugenics
The method of producing ideally normal human beings resembles a form of eugenics. It is thus not at all odd that Berman would advocate eugenics. The American eugenics debate, certainly at its most heated during the 1920s when ideas of racial hygiene were shared by social reformers from almost all political camps, was still highly topical during the 1930s and continued to be so until the start of the second World War.81 However, Berman was careful to insist on significant differences between the older Galtonian forms of racial hygiene and his own modern hormone-therapeutic eugenics. Negative eugenics aimed at reforming society through strict birth control and sterilization so that undesirable individuals would never be born. Positive eugenics wished to mate couples so their offspring would have better characteristics than the average person. Hormone therapy was a third way, concerned with remaking, improving and refining the human material which was already at hand. Instead of acting as executioner or matchmaker, the endocrinologist would be a creative engineer of humankind.
Berman’s view of the relation between heritage and environment was not even compatible with the ‘socially responsible’ eugenics advocated by left-wing British and American human geneticists during the 1930s. In direct opposition to conservative eugenicists who strove to preserve races and prevent miscegenation, these researchers, who included J. B. S. Haldane and Lancelot Hogben, insisted that the differences between peoples were largely the result of differences in social status. Thus they considered a successful eugenics aiming at better health, intelligence and ethics could only succeed in a free classless society where people lived in equality. Only then could biological differences express themselves.82 Berman’s idea was that the microcosm reflected the macrocosm, so it would be impossible to change society until humanity itself had been improved.
Berman criticized genetic eugenics as scientifically dubious. He pointed out that there still did not exist an exact science of the generational transmission of desirable and undesirable characteristics. Existing knowledge of the relation between predisposition, characteristics and heredity was simply too flawed. Endocrinology, on the other hand, was a true and proven science. ‘Production in animals of food deprivations and glandular deficiencies, correlated with corroborating, often instigating human reports of physicians, has generated a body of knowledge which can now be employed as a positive approach to the problems of human revision and betterment.’83 How characteristics acquired through hormone therapy were to be passed on from parents to children Berman could not answer definitively, but without being labelled a ‘Lamarckian’ he did feel it was likely. ‘No one has ever shown with absolute proof that a profound chemical change in the body of an individual will not be registered by a change in the chemistry of his reproducing cells. ’84 However, Berman emphasized that the problem of humankind’s refinement could not be solved by controlled fertilization. Individuals continue to develop throughout their lifetime; it is this development that Berman is interested in guiding.
It is interesting that Berman consistently speaks of a refinement of humankind in general: every individual and thereby humanity as a whole would be refined for the good of all. Berman simultaneously spoke for the individual and for society at large. This distinguishes him from his predecessors and contemporaries in racial hygiene, who privileged certain groups, their own people, race or nation state. This perception might be understood from the perspective of the internationalism which characterized inter-war New York City’s cultural life but is probably also an expression of Berman’s humanist and theosophical convictions about human rights and human equality.85 So his viewpoint can be seen as a predecessor of ‘liberal eugenics’, where attention is focused on the individual’s development, needs and wishes, not those of the state.86 Berman sometimes urges hormone therapy in national terms: ‘The returns for any nation that will put this knowledge into operation for its population as a whole in peace will not only be enormously satisfactory in terms of human and social dividends, but will render it impregnable and unconquerable in war, if it should ever come to it.’87 But, it should be noted, Berman never precisely specifies the nation in question.
Conclusion
The American endocrinologist Louis Berman nurtured grandiose visions of the possibilities of hormone therapy, its general ability to influence mankind’s health, happiness and lifespan. Injections of concentrated glandular extract and synthetically produced hormones could strengthen physiqu\e, beauty, vitality, energy, intelligence, imagination, masculinity and femininity, immunity, stamina, creativity and social empathy in a comprehensive manner. Just as plants and animals had successfully been bred for millennia, so the ideal human could now be created according to the norms and guidelines of biochemistry. The possibilities for humanity seemed limitless: ‘He can turn out through its manipulations, newer and better models of himself, or remodel himself nearer to his heart’s desire.’88 Such breeding would not be the preserve of a tiny elite. Like many other scientists in the United States, the social and political questions of the inter-war period made a strong impression on Berman. He advocated hormone therapeutic eugenics on a global scale. When humankind had finally perfected itself, when the physiological and biochemical foundation had been laid, it could then achieve the good society.
One might wonder how this ambitious programme of hormone therapy was to be implemented. During the 1930s the production of hormones was still a very complicated procedure. Available clinical treatments were as a rule prohibitively expensive, especially those extended over a longer period of time.89 To produce a mere milligram of androsterone (‘male sex hormone’) or of progesterone (‘female sex hormone’) then required approximately a thousand litres of urine, or ovaries from close to 2,500 sows, respectively.90 There was a growing pharmaceutical industry in the US and Europe which to a certain extent could produce hormone preparations, but Berman ignored the problem of funding the distribution of these preparations throughout the entire population. On the other hand, he had many ideas about how the dissemination of information and treatment could be organized.
Berman predictably places the main responsibility on the medical profession. When the researchers have done their scientific duty and acquired the necessary knowledge, it is up to practising physicians to assume a key role in the transformative process: ‘A new, positive, constructive work is at hand for medical practitioners in the amelioration of human quality.’91 To a certain extent, physicians could perform this duty during clinical hours. But beyond this Berman imagines special endocrinological centres in every city and town where metabolism, blood and secretions and general endocrinal status, especially those of pregnant women and of infants, could be regularly checked and adjusted when necessary. Finally, there should be a central authority in every country in the form of a national institute for research in psycho-endocrinology. In order for all this to be realized, politicians must act; the power to effect the transformation of mankind ultimately lies in the hands of the decision-makers. Thus Berman also uses the occasion to market his idea to them, not as a Utopia but as a fully realizable vision of the future.92
Berman believed this breeding programme rested on solid scientific and rational grounds. He consistently indicated the importance of distinguishing between endocrinological fact and pseudo-scientific fiction. Berman’s project was scientific and rational as seen from the perspective of 1930s New York, if only to a certain extent. The Swedish physician Torsten Lindner, generally positive towards Berman’s ‘therapeutic optimism’, was not exaggerating when in a 1943 review of New Creations in the Swedish medical journal Svenska Lkartidning he wrote that ‘the author is significantly lacking in sound balance where it is a question of considering what can already be achieved and what results may eventually be capable of achievement in the future’.93 One might ask whether it is indeed possible for researchers to express themselves about the consequences of their research without crossing the boundary between fact and fiction. The sociologist Michael Mulkay does not think so, and he is right:
When speculating about the development of new science-based technologies, participants cannot rely entirely upon what they take to be the established facts. While they think and argue about the shape of things to come, they have no alternative but to create some kind of story that goes beyond these facts.94
With more recent knowledge, it would not be hard to challenge each and every one of Berman’s scientific and medical claims, his perceptions of the constitution of the ‘ideal normal’ human being as well as his far-reaching assumptions about men, women, homosexuals and other matters. But in a history of scientific ideas such presentist judgements are sterile. One can nevertheless place Berman’s ideas in the long post-Platonic Utopian tradition which seeks to refine humankind as a species. Even if Berman’s visions were utopian and rejected by some of his colleagues in the US and abroad, they were not without meaning. On the contrary it is likely that, together with other actors’ similar visions, they contributed to raising interest in endocrinology among the public, politicians and businessmen, thereby also encouraging concerns with the finance, development and use of such research.95
Hormone treatment of different kinds experienced a dramatic medical breakthrough during and after the second World War. These treatments have often had a positive effect on individuals’ health and well-being. They have even, for better or worse, influenced the development of society: consider the significance of cortisone, the Pill and menopausal preparations. Hormones have also become good business. Few pharmaceuticals have received such global use as hormones, though they have not proven to be a panacea. If hormones can relieve many symptoms, even prolong life, they can seemingly neither eradicate nor cure any of the more serious illnesses. The historian of medicine Roy Porter offers this example: insulin treatment now saves the lives of diabetics, but the problem of diabetes is much more comprehensive and widespread than before insulin was discovered and put to use.96
As early as the 1930s hormone therapy, like so many other treatments, proved to be the cause of unexpected and typically undesirable side effects, sometimes more serious than the symptoms they were initially meant to alleviate. Interestingly, despite the caution expressed during his lifetime, it never occurred to Berman that hormone therapy is thus double-edged; the risks of hormone therapy seem to have been a blind spot. The new physiology’s hormone therapy never became the agent of positive social reform which Berman and many other researchers had anticipated. Whether or not the new biology’s gene therapy will become such an agent remains to be seen.
1 L. M. Silver, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family, New York, 2002. Compare J. Maienschein, Whose View of Life f Embryos, Cloning, and Stem Cells, Cambridge, MA, 2005.
2 P. Martin, ‘ Great expectations : the construction of markets, products and user needs during the early development of gene therapy in the USA’, in Technology and the Market: Demand, Users and Innovation (ed. R. Coombs et al.), Cheltenham, 2001, 38-67; S. Lundin and L. Akesson (eds.), Gene Technology and Economy, Lund, 2002; I. Hellsten, ‘Selling the life sciences: promises of a better future in biotechnology advertisements’, Science as Culture (2002), 11, 459-79; A. Hedgecoe and P. Martin, ‘The drugs don’t work: expectations and the shaping of pharmacogenetics’, Social Studies of Science (2003), 33, 327-64.
3 See also E. Russo and D. Cove, Genetic Engineering: Dreams and Nightmares, New York, 1995; J. Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture, Cambridge, 1998; T. Richards, ‘Three views of genetics: the enthusiast, the visionary and the sceptic’, British Medical Journal (2001), 322, 1016-17.
4 N. Brown, B. Rappert and A. Webster (eds.), Contested Futures: A Sociology of Prospective Technoscience, Aldershot, 2000.
5 Platon, Staten (Swedish translation), Nora, 1993,198.
6 Turney, op. cit. (3). Compare A. Kerr and T. Shakespeare, Genetic Politics: Front Eugenics to Genome, Cheltenham, 2002.
7 This topic has recently been explored in S. M. Rothman and D. J. Rothman, The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement, New York, 2003.
8 M. Borell, ‘Setting the standards for a new science: Edward Schafer and endocrinology’, Medical History (1978 (,22,282-90.
9 N. Rasmussen, ‘Steroids in arms: science, government, industry, and the hormones of the adrenal cortex in the United States, 1930- 1950’, Medical History (2002), 46, 299-324, 299.
10 Rothman and Rothman, op. cit. (7), is an important exception.
11 The literature on this topic is vast; see the bibliographies in N. Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones, London, 1994: and A. E. Clarke, Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and the ‘Problems of Sex’, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1998.
12 J. E. Rechter, ‘”The glands of destiny”: a history of popular, medical and scientific views of the sex hormones in 1920s America’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1997. In this thesis only Berman’s first book of 1921 is discussed.
13 L. Berman, New Creations in Human Beings, New York, 1938.
14 P. J. Pauly, Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990; and Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams (eds.), The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine, Cambridge, 1992.
15 Bernard’s example was the liver. He differentiated between the discharge of the bile (secretion externe) and the giving-off of glucose into the blood (secretion interne).
16 Oudshoorn, op. cit. (11), 16; and Rechter, op. cit. (12), p. xxviii.
17 L. G. Wilson, ‘Internal secretions in disease: the historical relations of clinical medicine and scientific physiology’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1984), 39, 263- \302; and C. Sengoopta, ‘The modern ovary: constructions, meanings, uses’, History of Science (2000), 38, 425-88.
18 N. Oudshoorn, ‘ On the making of sex hormones : research materials and the production of knowledge ‘, Social Studies of Science (1990), 20, 5-33.
19 N. Oudshoorn, ‘United we stand: the pharmaceutical industry, laboratory, and clinic in the development of sex hormones into scientific drugs, 1920-1940’, Science, Technology and Human Values (1993), 18, 5-24.
20 See, for example, M. Borell, ‘Brown-Squard’s organotherapy and its appearance in America at the end of the nineteenth century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1976), 50, 309-20.
21 E. Steinach, Hormonema sont forma livet, Swedish tr., Stockholm, 1940. Concerning the history of glandular transplantations see D. Hamilton, The Monkey Gland Affair, London, 1986.
22 C. Sengoopta, ‘Glandular politics: experimental biology, clinical medicine, and homosexual emancipation in fin-de-sicle central Europe’, Isis (1998), 89, 445-73.
23 M. Borell, ‘ Organotherapy, British physiology, and discovery of the internal secretions ‘, Journal of the History of Biology (1976), 9, 235-68.
24 E. M. Tansey, ‘What’s in a name? Henry Dale and adrenaline, 1906’, Medical History (1995), 39, 459-76.
25 V. C. Medvei, The History of Clinical Endocrinology: A Comprehensive Account of Endocrinology from Earliest Times to the Present Day, Carnforth, Lanes and New York, 1993, 3-6.
26 Rechter, op. cit. (12), 178.
27 The standard work on the history of insulin is M. Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin, Toronto, 1983. For a network analysis of the development process see C. Sinding, ‘ Making the unit of insulin : standards, clinic work, and industry, 1920-1925’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2002), 76, 231-70.
28 F. M. Pottenger, ‘The Association for the Study of Internal Secretions: its past, its future’, Endocrinology (1942), 30, 846- 52; H. Lisser, ‘The first forty years (1917-1957)’, Endocrinology (1967), 80, 5-28; and A. E. Wilhelmi, ‘The Endocrine Society: origin, organization, and institutions’, Endocrinology (1988), 123, 2-43.
29 L. F. Barker, ‘The study of the internal secretions: an introduction’, Endocrinology (1917), 1, 2.
30 Wilhelmi, op. cit. (28), 13.
31 The Swedish Society for Endocrinology was established in 1945 and the British Society for Endocrinology in 1946. A Scandinavian Society for Endocrinology was then established in 1948. It later became a society for north Europe.
32 Medvei, op. cit. (25), 275-9.
33 D. Long Hall, ‘The critic and the advocate: contrasting British views on the state of endocrinology in the early 1920s’; and T. F. Glick, ‘On the diffusion of a new speciality: Maran and the “crisis” of endocrinology in Spain ‘Journal of the History of Biology (1976), 9, 269-85; 287-300.
34 A. C. Clarke, ‘Controversy and the development of reproductive sciences’, Social Problems (1990), 37, 18-37.
35 Pottenger, op. cit. (28), 846. See also T. B. Schwartz, ‘Henry Harrower and the turbulent beginnings of endocrinology’, Annals of Internal Medicine (1999), 131, 702-6.
36 A theory of sex chromosomes had been launched, but was still controversial. S. G. Brush, ‘Nettie M. Stevens and the discovery of sex determination by chromosomes’, Isis (1978), 69, 163-72.
37 For a survey of the early results from CRPS see E. Allen, C. H. Danforth and E. A. Doisy (eds.), Sex and Internal Secretions: A Survey of Recent Research, Baltimore, MD, 1939.
38 Oudshoorn, op. cit. (18); and J. P. Gaudillire, ‘The invisible industrialist: the technological dynamics of 20th-century biological research”, in The Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications (ed. K. Grandin, N. Wormbs and S. Widmalm), Sagamore Beach, MA, 2004,172-6.
39 R. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, London, 1997, 566; and A. Westman, Hormoner, Stockholm, 1940,19.
40 E. E. Slosson, ‘From complexes to glands’, Scientific Monthly (1922), 15. Quoted from Rechter, op. cit. (12), 5.
41 Slosson, op. cit. (40).
42 B. Harrow, Glands in Health and Disease, New York, 1922.
43 Rechter, op. cit. (12), p. vi.
44 For biographical information on Herman see The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. 39, New York, 1954; and Who Was Who in America: A Component Volume of Who’s Who in American History, Vol. 2, Chicago, 1966.
45 P. L. Munson, ‘Parathyroid hormone and calcitonin’, in Endocrinology: People and Ideas (ed. S. M. McCann), New York, 1988, 239-84.
46 L. Berman, ‘Psycho-endocrinology’, Science (1928), 67, 195.
47 L. E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology, New York, 1996, 39-50. As far as I know, Berman was not linked to that programme. It is, however, possible that the director, Warren Weaver, was influenced by Berman’s texts.
48 L. Berman, The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature, London, 1921. This book received many positive reviews, but some critical as well. In the journal Endocrinology (1922), 6, 272- 4, it is described both as ‘one of the most engaging ever written in the field of endocrinology’ and as ‘an unfortunate piece of futility’.
49 Berman, op. cit. (48), 109-12, 202-30. Berman’s ideas may be compared with Ernst Kretschemer’s contemporary approach in Krperbau und Charakter: Untersuchungen zutn Konstitutionsproblem und zur Lehre von den Temperamenten, Berlin, 1922.
50 Berman, op. cit. (48), 288-9. According to Herman, it was Arthur Keith at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England who first used endocrinology for research on race differences.
51 Berman, op. cit. (48), 255-91.
52 Berman, op. cit. (48), 275.
53 Turney, op. cit. (3), 99-102.
54 L. Berman, The Personal Equation, New York, 1925.
55 Berman, op. cit. (54), 214-17.
56 L. Berman, Crime and the Endocrine Glands, New York, 1932. Barman’s conclusion was that criminals should not be punished but treated with hormone replacement
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