524 PEDIATRICS 



same perils that are attended with it later on when the differentia- 

 tion of sex has been completed and is recognized. Babies under 

 a year, and children under 8 or 10 will outlive their unfortunate 

 habit, and do not appear to suffer much from its influence. What- 

 ever is said to the contrary is the exaggeration of such as like to 

 revel in horrors. The same exorbitant imagination is exhibited in 

 other statements. What Lombroso and his followers have said of 

 the faulty arrangement of the teeth, prognathic skulls, retracted 

 nose, short and attached lobes of the auricle, as distinct symptoms 

 of mental degeneracy, belongs to that class, and need not always 

 be taken as the positive signs of insane criminality. There is so 

 much poetical exaggeration and word-painting in them that Lom- 

 broso and also Krafft-Ebing are the pets of the prurient lay public. 

 In its midst there must be many who are anxious to believe with 

 Lombroso that brown hair and eyes, brachycephalic heads, and a 

 medium size of the body characterizes the insane criminal, if only 

 for the purpose of scanning the hair and eyes and heads of their 

 near friends and their mother-in-law's relatives. 



It is certainly not true that, as Lombroso will have it, children 

 are cruel, lazy, lying, thievish, just as little as according to him 

 all savages are like carnivorous animals, and essentially criminal, 

 while others are convinced that by nature they are amiable, like 

 Uncas, and virtuous like Chingacook, and have been rendered sav- 

 age only by the strenuousness of conquering immigrants. Nor is 

 it true that the idiot brain is merely arrested at a stage similar to 

 the anthropoid, or even saurian development, for it is less arrest of 

 development than the influence of embryonal or fetal disease, beside 

 amniotic anomalies that cause the irregularities of the encephalon. 



Amongst the worst causes of idiocy is cretinism, both the ende- 

 mic and the sporadic. Every cretin is an idiot, not vice versa. 

 The endemic could be prevented by state interference which would 

 empty the stricken valleys; the sporadic depends on thyroidism, 

 with or without a shortening of the base of the skull, and is par- 

 tially curable. The idictism of cretinism causes a fairly uniform 

 set of symptoms; that which depends on other causes exhibits 

 varieties, though not so many as imbecility, which, too, should not 

 be taken to be the result of a single cause. Osseous and cartilag- 

 inous anomalies about the nose are pointed out by William Hill, 

 chronic pharyngitis and nasal polypi by Heller, enlarged tonsils 

 by Kafemann in one third of the cases, some pharyngeal or nasal 

 anomaly in four fifths by Schmid-Monnard. Adenoids are frequently 

 found as complications. Operations to meet all these anomalies 

 have been performed with improvement of the mental condition 

 in some, of the physical in many more, mainly when the anomalies 

 were complications only. But after all we should beware of the 



