-pituitary nature, with
an intellectual ability and maturity that was at first all-conquering.
In the face of a society organized for pure masculine and pure
feminine types, disgrace and disaster at last overtook him with almost
the ruthlessness of natural selection wiping out an unadapted sport
suddenly cropping up in an environment. In prison he suffered from
severe splitting headaches, which were probably due to changes in his
pituitary. Described as being directly over the eyes, they haunted him
until his death, and may have had a good deal to do with the absinthe
addiction he acquired.

THE TREATMENT OF GENIUS

The problem of Oscar Wilde raises an ethical question that still
remains to be finally answered. Granting that all of society should
one day see him and his kind as a peculiar and specific constitutional
product of an odd intermixture of internal secretions, what should
be done with him and them? It is easy to play with words like
"degenerates." But still, we do not condemn imbeciles, idiots or
defectives, or other substandard, subnormal creatures to the prisons.
For the sake of the good opinion society would maintain of itself,
it sends the latter nowadays to hospitals, sanitaria, or their
equivalents, where protection for itself without punishment for them
may be practised. But is confinement, or even treatment the solution?
For we have to consider what society would lose by cutting such
abnormals off from itself, and them from its stimulations. A number
of artists have been built like Oscar Wilde, musicians in particular.
Without them, would there not be a great gap, a yawning absence, in
the world's culture?

Modern diagnosis and modern therapy might have done a great deal for
Napoleon, Nietzsche, Julius Caesar, Florence Nightingale, Oscar Wilde.
Were they alive today, and willing to submit themselves to scientific
scrutiny, the X-ray would tell us of the state of the pituitary and
thymus in them, chemical examinations of the blood the condition of
the thyroid and adrenals, detailed investigation of the body and mind
a flood of light upon their maladies as well as their personalities.
Therapy might have relieved Napoleon of his attacks, and so, halting
the creeping degeneration of his pituitary, made Waterloo impossible.
But then, would we have had the Emperor at all? Would there have been
enough of that instability that drives on the genius to his goal?
Nietzsche might have been relieved of his head