DUCTLESS GLANDS 535 



other great painters, and the athletic, acrobatic and hmnoristic dwarfs 

 of our vaudeville shows. 



Among the ancient Eomans, it was customary to test the increase 

 in the girth of a young woman's neck, in connection with defloration or 

 pregnancy, by measurement with a thread, as indicated in the lines of 



Catullus : 



Non illam nutrix oriente luce revisens 

 Hesterno collum poterit circumdare filo, 



but there is no evidence that they associated this cervical enlargement 

 with the thyroid gland. Endemic goiter, however, was so well known 

 in antiquity that Juvenal (XIIL, 162) has preserved its commonplace 

 aspects in a single line: " Qais tumidum guttur miratus in Alpious" 

 ("Who wonders at goiter in the Alps?") ; and Pliny, in his Natural 

 History (XL 68), hinted at one theory of its causation when he said 

 that "only men and swine are subject to swellings in the throat, which 

 are mostly caused by the noxious quality of the water they drink." 

 In the sixteenth century Paracelsus found goiter to be endemic in the 

 Salzburg region, again attributed it to metallic and mineral constituents 

 in the water, and noticed that it coexisted with another disease of the 

 same locality, cretinism or myxcedema. While goiter is not a necessary 

 characteristic of idiots (proprium stultorum) , says Paracelsus, yet it is 

 most commonly found among them (so trifft es die am meisteti) 5 after 

 which, he wanders off into his usual astrological theories, in which few 

 can follow him. The important point is that in goitrous regions, as 

 Dock says, cretins may have goitrous mothers while the marriage of two 

 cretins is usually sterile, 6 which makes the observation of Paracelsus fit 

 in very well with his main theory of the provenance of idiots (generatio 

 stultorum). 



In 1614 Felix Plater, another Swiss physician, published an obser- 

 vation which seems truly modern, an autopsy of an infant who had died 

 from enlargement of the thymus gland ("thymus-death"). 7 



As we begin to perceive the relation of these varied phenomena to 

 the glands of internal secretion, it will not seem strange that Bordeu, 

 who -first stated the modern theory, should have hit upon the sexual 

 gonads as the most obvious illustration, for nearly all these glands are 

 in some way connected with the sexual characteristics of the individual. 

 We may now pass from the stage of hap-hazard observations to that 

 in which certain diseases were closely and accurately described, like 

 objects in natural history, and it is worthwhile to range these in chrono- 



s Paracelsus, "De generatione stultorum" (in his "Opera," Strassburg, 

 1603, pt. 2, p. 177. 



e George Dock on "Cretinism" in Osier's "Modern Medicine," Philadel- 

 phia, 1909, VI., 448. 



7 Plater, " Observationum in hominibus affectibus . . .," libri III., Basel, 

 1614, 172. Cited by Friedleben. 



