How do we know that Oscar Wilde was a thymocentric?  Because in his fullest development he exhibited all the earmarks of the thymus pattern.  We possess a number of good pictures and descriptions of him, as he was really a contemporary, and would probably be alive today if he had been put in a hospital for proper treatment instead of in prison.  An excellent description is that of Henri de Regnier’s:  “This foreigner (Wilde) was tall, and of great corpulence.  A high complexion seemed to give still greater width to his clean shaven face.  It was the unbearded (glabre) face that one sees on coins.  The hands ... were rather fleshy and plump.”  The points of immediate interest are the height, the complexion and the beardlessness.  One classic variety of the thymocentric is tall, has a baby’s skin, and has little or no hair on the face.  A passage from a narrative written by one of his warders confirms the last condition decidedly.  “Before leaving his cell to see a visitor, he was alway careful to conceal, as far as possible, his unshaven chin by means of his red handkerchief.”  Bristles on the chin, with little or none on the cheeks, is the inference.  It is important to stress the thymocentric significance of this glabrosity of the face.  Another sign to be put in italics was the quality of his voice.  It has been described as a beautiful tenor, when he had it under perfect control, and high pitched and strident when under the influence of passion or temper.  Such a voice would be the product of a larynx remaining partly or completely in the infantile state, as in a woman’s.  That, and the large breasts he is said to have had, point again to the thymus-centered constitution.  All in all, there can be no doubt that Oscar Wilde was a case of status lymphaticus, the technical name for the thymus-centered personality.

As happens in a number of thymocentrics, his pituitary must have attempted to compensate for the endocrine deficiencies always present in them.  The exceptional size of his head was a pituitary trait.  Finding, possibly making, plenty of room for itself to grow, for some unknown reason, in an extraordinary fashion, it reinforced the love of the beautiful that is part of the feminine post-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