r. My complexion is rotten, and my
hair is coming out, and I look like a potato bag, and I think my
arches are falling,... and the whole business is a confounded nuisance
of a biological process."

The exploration of the internal secretions has brought us an
explanation and an understanding of why child-bearing is a nuisance.
We know now that if Carol Kennicott's complexion became rotten and
her hair fell out, it was because her thyroid was not adequate to the
demands of pregnancy, and that if her arches were falling, and her
figure acquiring a potato bag dumpiness, it was because her pituitary
was insufficient. In all probability she was a thymus-centered type,
which accounts for much of the material that goes to make up the
novel.

Different endocrine types react characteristically toward the
situations of pregnancy. The adrenal type may not be able to respond
with the necessary enlargement of its cortex which is normal for the
needs of gestation. So pigmentations, darkenings and discolorations of
the skin, especially of the face, the traditional chloasma develops.
The hyperthyroid type may become sharply exaggerated, almost to the
point of mania and psychosis. The subthyroid will suffer an emphasis
of her defect, and pass on, because of pregnancy, to the truly
diseased state of myxedema, the state of dull, slow, stupid,
semi-animal semi-idiocy. The pituitary type becomes more masculinized.
The face becomes more triangular and coarser, the chin and cheek-bones
more pronounced, and there is a growth of all the bones, so that she
is seen to grow visibly in height and breadth, and in the size of the
hands and feet. Concomitantly, there is a changed, a more matured and
steadier outlook upon life, all due to stimulation of the anterior
pituitary, controller of growth, physical and mental.

In general, the major endocrines, the pituitary, the adrenals, and the
thyroid should hypertrophy and hyperfunction during pregnancy.
Should they not, should adverse mechanical circumstances or chemical
malfunction prevent, dire effects may follow. A woman with the
closed-in type of pituitary, shut up in a small non-expansile sella
turcica, will suffer the most violent headaches, will become fat, will
frequently abort. One whose thyroid cannot rise to the demands of
gestation, because of previous disease (like typhoid or measles) which
injured her thyroid excessively, may be poisoned by the new elements
introduced into the blood by t