ined an ascendency in the
concert of her internal secretions, so coloring her life with its
masculine tints, and altering her face as well as her disposition. The
photograph of her taken when she was 38 shows a quadrangular outline,
and all the acridity that impressed Strachey. The last picture of her,
a water color drawing made in 1907, shows a round visaged old dame,
who might be the peasant grandmother of two dozen descendants. Little
patches of red over the cheek bones remind one of myxedema and
indicate that toward the very end of her life her thyroid failed her
as well as her pituitary. So that our biographer relates: "Then by
Royal Command, the Order of Merit was brought to South Street, and
there was a little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson, after
a short speech, stepped forward and handed the order of the insignia
to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly recognized
that some compliment was being paid her. 'Too kind--too kind!' she
murmured; and she was not ironical." In the days of pituitary and
thyroid hyperfunction we may be sure she would have been caustically
and penetratingly ironical.
THE EXPLANATION OF OSCAR WILDE
The case of Oscar Wilde, as one of the high tragedies of English
Literature and Life, attracted the attention of the whole world in its
heyday, and even today evokes controversy. As a literary figure and
artist, the poet of the Portrait of Dorian Gray, and "De Profundis,"
belongs without a doubt to the immortals. As a convicted criminal, who
served for two years at hard labor in Reading jail, and afterwards,
a prey to chronic alcoholism, died in obscurity in Paris, he still
remains a subject of whispered conversation in private, and his crime
a taboo to the public, mentionable only at the risk of arousing the
terrible odium sexicum of the prurient majority. Oscar Wilde was a
homosexual of a certain type. In view of the previously laid down
considerations concerning the endocrine genesis of homosexuality, how
are we to explain him, and his natural history?
As with the other exemplars of genius examined we need here, too, to
gain some insight into his "internal secretion heredity." His father,
Sir William Wilde, was a surgeon. Photographs of him show the long
and broad face of a pituito-adrenal centered individual, with
a corresponding duplex incarnation in the face, the upper half
strikingly spiritual, the lower curiously animal.
He was active, practical and em
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