a pituitary-centered personality. It is to
be regretted that we have no picture or record of Nietzsche caught
smiling, which would have preserved the state of his teeth for us. At
any rate, considered as checks to my interpretation, his physiognomy
and physique, the nature of his genius and the attacks which finally
ruined his life, all fit into the conception of him as one whose life
centered, like Napoleon's, around what was happening in his sella
turcica.

The attacks of sick-headache, diagnosable symptomatically as
migraine, were so devastating that in 1883, after the printing of his
masterpiece, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," he wrote "My life has been
a complete failure." Extracts from his letters, collected by Gould,
provide some idea of his suffering. In 1888, just before his stroke,
he said, "I have in my eyes a dynamometer of my entire condition."

The history of Nietzsche's eye trouble makes it probable that not
simply a defect in his eyes themselves, but a deeper condition behind
them was responsible. Up to the age of 15 he was a model scholar.
Essential eye defects of refraction should make themselves felt during
childhood. Then, with adolescence, he changed. Adolescence is one
of the red-letter epochs for the pituitary, when its growth and
enlargement precedes and stimulates the ripening of the sex cells
in the reproductive organs. Until adolescence ended and physical
development ceased, his intellectual interests were nil, and he was
particularly backward in mathematics. Colds and coughs, and recurring
pains in the head and eyes bothered him (colds and coughs are frequent
in those whose pituitary expansion is limited by the bony sella
turcica to any extent). After his puberty, migraine definitely became
his demon companion. Following the diphtheria in the army (which
must have damaged his adrenals), the attacks grew much worse, and
complaints about them more bitter because the pituitary now, in
addition to its own burden, had to compensate for the insufficient
adrenals. So "his frequent illness made him more and more a subject of
treatment and commiseration.... If only my eyes would hold out ...
it seems to me at the age of 30 as if I had lived 60 years ... very
frequent sufferings of stomach, head and eyes ... acidity oppresses
me, and everything except the tenderest food becomes acid.... I cannot
doubt that I am the victim of a serious cerebral disease, and that
stomach and eyes suffer only from this cen