Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

HUMANITIES ARE THE HORMONES ALBERT R. JONSEN* The odd phrase "humanities are the hormones" comes from the last lecture delivered by the man who, above all others, united in his mind and work humanities and medical science, Sir William Osier. In 1919, several months before his death, Oxford's Regius Professor of Medicine was elected president of the British Classical Society. He entitled his presidential lecture "The Old Humanities and the New Science." In the course of this speech about the way in which scientific education and the humanities should inform each other, Sir William told his audience of classical scholars, "You secrete materials which do for society at large what the thyroid gland does for the individual. The humanities are the hormones . . . the humanities bring the student into contact with the minds who gave us the philosophies, the models ofour literature, the ideals of democratic freedom, the fine and technical arts, the fundamentals of science, the basis of our law . . . into contact with the dead who never die, with those immortal lives 'not of now, nor of yesterday, but who always are' " [1, pp. 26, 28]. Why call humanities the hormones? Sir William exploits the etymology of the word "hormone," which means, in ancient Greek, "to set in motion, urge, push on." He suggests by this metaphor that the work of classical scholars energizes the intellectual life of society, just as the thyroid gland energizes the intellectual life ofan individual. He says, "Man's body is a humming hive of working cells each with its specific function, all under the control of the brain and heart, and all dependent on materials called hormones . . . which lubricate the wheels of life. For example, remove the thyroid gland just below the Adam's apple, and you deprive man of the lubricants which enable his thought engines to work, and gradually the stored acquisitions of his mind cease to be available and within a year he sinks into dementia . . . the paragon of *Department of Medical History and Ethics, School of Medicine SB-20, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 09195.© 1989 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1-5982/90/3301-0652$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 33, 1 ¦ Autumn 1989 \ 133 animals is transformed into a shapeless caricature of humanity" [1, pp. 25, 26]. When Sir William was speaking, endocrinology was in its infancy. Adrenaline was the first hormone to be isolated, in 1902, and the generic name, hormone, was chosen several years later with the help of the professor of Greek at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1905, E. H. Starling, lecturing before the Royal College ofPhysicians, spoke of "chemical messengers—or hormones as we might call them—have to be carried to the organ which they affect by means of the blood stream, and the recurring physiological needs of the organism must determine their repeated production and circulation throughout the body" [2, p. 342]. By 1919, when the Regius Professor was lecturing, many hormones had been identified, including thyroxine, by E. C. Kendall, in 1914. Thus, Sir William was describing for his classical scholars (W. T. Vesey, the classicist who had named the "hormones," might have been in the audience) the course of hypothyroidism, or myxedema, a clinical condition long known to be caused by deficiency of iodine but now understood more fundamentally as a hormonal dysfunction. In primary hypothyroidism , decreased or absent secretion of thyroxine leads to an accumulation of mucopolysaccharide in connective tissue, which produces weakness, lethargy, dry, coarse skin, edema, cramps, constipation; more to Sir William's purposes, there is also a mental effect. In the words of a modern medical text: "hearing impairment, somnolence, decreased memory and ability to calculate may occur. These may lead to psychological withdrawal and paranoia. The term myxedema madness has been used to describe this syndrome, which can be mistaken for dementia" [3, p. 1214]. Sir William, acute clinician though he was, did not know the precise etymology of myxedema madness, but its clinical manifestation, together with its newly discovered linkage to the hormone thyroxine, gave him matter for a fine metaphor, "humanities are the hormones." His thesis is that humanistic studies—the classics, history, philosophy...