You should understand that one of the longest searches man has ever indulged in has been that of longevity itself. And the study of living longer is Geriatrics. I, by the way, was one time a leading light in the American Society of Gerontology. What do you feed men to make them live longer? Well, there are many such preparations. Women: there’s equinprivine, stilbestrol — the female hormones. Somebody gets beyond forty or something like that, why, they ought to start shooting them with a bit of equinprivine, something like that, that makes them look younger and feel friskier and make passes at the iceman.
Anyway, I had a very astonishing experience one time. I saw a lady and… This was right after the war. I had just studied quite a bit of endocrinology and found it a very fascinating study, but I was only studying it for one particular peculiar reason. I wanted to find out if the mind monitored the body or the body monitored the mind. And obviously the switchboard system between the body and the mind is the endocrine system or the glands. All right. Could you feed somebody these marvelous preparations which had been biochemically developed and effect a better frame of mind? And I found out that you could do so, occasionally, on lots of people. That’s not good enough, is it? What was introducing the variable?
Traumatic second dynamic [relates to sex] occlusions and one thing or another prevented the hormones and other shots from operating. I did this work at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. All right. A line officer wears his badges of rank on both collars and a staff officer wears them only on one collar, see. So I first got into their medical library simply by taking off one of my rank badges off one collar and hired a Marine to come by and say, “Good afternoon, Doctor.” And that was very simple.
So anyway, we entered the field of endocrinology for only that reason and I ruined a great many cases. I ruined them abundantly. I — there was a doctor there by the name of — I think his name — one of the doctors on the thing was named Yankewitz, improbably. And this guy was keeping records on this sort of thing. And they — the government at vast expense was importing carload lots of pills and shots and monkey glands, and they had the problem of all the fellows who had been incarcerated in the Japanese prison camps. And these fellows were in a very bad state. They were too fat, and they were too thin, and they were too this, and they were too that, and they were trying to put them back to rights with hormones.
And this is a very valid proposition. You can do far more for somebody’s ulcers by giving him shots of testosterone than any other known method. The doctors, of course, are unable to operate, so they don’t favor it. It’s out of favor entirely.
Anyway, they were bringing these pills in and capsules in carload lots and they were administering them to people. And having a bit of access to their records, I knew what cases were being successfully affected and which weren’t. And so I have done a little bit of work in trying to ascertain whether or not the people who were being successfully affected were or were not aberrated. And decided they were not very badly aberrated. And the people on whom they were not being effective, I found to have psychic traumas by the bucketload; and à la Freud, with a few frills from Ron, flipped a few psychic traumas out of the road and made these endocrines operate on them very successfully, and came to the conclusion that an endocrine…
The United States Navy should be given a rising vote of thanks for this, because I’m sure the program cost them millions and millions and millions of dollars. And they derived absolutely no benefit from it of any kind whatsoever. But we did. I didn’t ruin their whole program, but I sure sent their figures a little bit awry occasionally, you see. It’s how many — what the dosage should be. And on a case or two it became “none.”
Now, this simply monitored this — this was not very conclusive, it was not very definite, and I could have done far more along this line of course, but I was only trying to establish one thing: By using physical substances, could you change a person’s mind? You understand? Or, by changing a person’s mind, could you change the character of physical substances? I found the latter to be the case and thereafter have spent no time monkeying with physical substances. Do you follow this line of reasoning?1
Notes
- Hubbard, L. R. (1962, 20 September). Geriatrics. Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, (SHSBC-213). Lecture conducted from East Grinstead, Sussex. ↩