The Rebel Angels

"People have always been interested in their faeces; primitive people take a look after they've had a motion, to see if it tells them anything, and there are more civilized people who do that than you'd suppose. Usually they are frightened; they've heard that cancer can give you blood in your stools, and you'd be amazed how many of them rush off to the doctor in a sweat when they've forgotten the Harvard beets they ate the day before. In the old days doctors looked at the stuff, just the way they looked at urine. They couldn't cut into anybody, but they made quite a lot of those examinations."

"Scatomancy, they called it," said Maria. "Could they have learned anything?"

"Not much," said Ozy; "though if you know what you are doing you can find out a few things by smell – the faeces of a drug-addict, for instance, are easy to identify. Of course when real investigative science got going they did some work on faeces – you know, measured the amounts of nitrogen and ether extract and neutral fat and cholalic acid, and all the inspissated mucus and bile and bacteria, and the large amounts of dead bacteria. The quantity of food residue is quite small. That work was useful in a restricted area as a diagnostic process, but nobody carried it very far. What really got me going on it was Osier.

"Osier was always throwing off wonderful ideas and insights that he didn't follow up; I suppose he expected other people would deal with them when they got around to it. As a student I was caught by his brief remarks on what was then called catarrhal enteritis; he mentioned changes in the constitution of the intestinal secretion – said, "We know too little about the succus entericus to be able to speak of influences induced by change in its quantity or quality." He wrote that in 1896. But he proposed some associations between diarrhoea and cancer, and anaemia, and some kidney ailments, and what he said stuck in my mind.

"It wasn't till about ten years ago that I came on a book that brought back what Osier had said, though the application was radically different. It was a proposal for what the author named Constitutional Psychology – a man called W. H. Sheldon, a respected Harvard scientist. Roughly, what he said was that there was a fundamental connection between physique and temperament. Not a new idea, of course."

"Renaissance writing is full of it," said Maria.

"You wouldn't call it scientific, though. You wouldn't be able to go that far."

"It was pretty good," said Maria. "Paracelsus said that there were more than a hundred, and probably more than a thousand, kinds of stomach, so that if you collected a thousand people it would be as foolish to say they were alike in body, and treat them as if they were alike in body, as it would be to suppose they were identical in spirit. 'There are a hundred forms of health,' he said, 'and the man who can lift fifty pounds may be as able-bodied as a man who can lift three hundred pounds.' "

"He may have said it, but he couldn't prove it."

"He knew it by insight."

"Now, now, Miss Theotoky, that'll never do. You have to prove things like that experimentally."

"Did Sheldon prove what Paracelsus said experimentally?"

"He certainly did!"

"That just proves Paracelsus was the greater man; he didn't have to fag away in a lab to get the right answer."

"We don't know if Sheldon got the completely right answer; we don't have any answers yet – just careful findings. Now -"

"She's teasing you, Ozy," I said. "Maria, you be quiet and let the great man talk. Perhaps we'll give Paracelsus an innings later. You know, of course, that Professor Froats is under great criticism at present, of a kind that could be harmful."

"So was Paracelsus – hounded from one country to another, and laughed at by all the universities. And he didn't have academic tenure, either. But I'm sorry; please don't let me interrupt."

What a contentious girl she was! But refreshing. I had a sneaking feeling for Paracelsus myself. But I wanted to hear about Sheldon, and on Ozy went.

"He wasn't just saying that people are different, you know. He showed how they were different. He worked on four thousand college students, altogether. Not the best sample, of course – all young, all intelligent – not enough variety, which is what I'm trying to achieve. But he finally divided his four thousand guinea pigs into three main groups.

"They were the endomorphs, who had soft, rounded bodies, and the mesomorphs, who were muscular and bony, and then the ectomorphs, who were fragile and skinny. He did extensive research into their temperaments and their backgrounds and the way they lived and what they wanted from life, and he found that the fatties were viscerotonics, or gut-people, who loved comfort in all its forms; and the muscular, tough types were somatotonics, whose pleasure was in exercise and exertion; and the skinnies were cerebrotonics, who were intellectual and nervous – head-people, in fact.