540 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Charcot's pupil, Pierre Marie, who differentiated the affection from 

 myxcedema, osteitis deformans and leantiasis ossea, gave it its present 

 name and, four years later, correlated it with disease of the pituitary 

 body. 13 Marie's claims to priority are somewhat vitiated by the fact 

 that a lesion of the pituitary body in acromegaly had already been noted 

 by Verga (1864), Brigidi (1877) and more particularly in the superb 

 autopsy made by the late Edwin Klebs in 1884, which is the work of 

 a veteran pathologist. This monograph, 14 based upon a case furnished 

 by Dr. Fritsche, of Glarus, Switzerland, contains two striking views 

 of the patient and a remarkable diagram of the acromegalic skull; 

 the hypertrophy of the pituitary body and the consequent widening 

 of the sella turcica is strongly emphasized. But the opinion of the 

 eminent pathologist is divided between this lesion and a proliferation 

 of the thymus gland, which he found in the same autopsy, and after 

 balancing the claims of the two lesions at length, he winds up by declar- 

 ing that the cause of the disease must remain obscure. The view of 

 Marie, which connects it directly with a lesion of the pituitary body, 15 has 

 been, with some reservations, the theory accepted up to the present hour. 

 It is interesting to note that, from the time of Galen up to the seven- 

 teenth century, the pituitary body was held to be the source of the 

 mucous discharges of the nose. Vesalius, for this reason, called it the 

 " glans pituitam excipiens." This idea was overthrown in Conrad Victor 

 Schneider's treatise on the membranes of the nose (" Decatarrhis," 1660) 

 and by Eichard Lower in 1672. Theophile de Bordeu, in his anatomical 

 researches, states that the ancients thought the office of the pituitary 

 ibody was to empty its humors through the nostrils, the moderns hold- 

 ing that it sent them to the sinuses of the sella turcica, and there the 

 matter ends with him, although he indulges a few vague conjectures 

 as to the possibility of the passage of the pituitary secretions into the 

 circulation. 



(To be continued) 



is Marie, 'Rev. de med., Paris, 1886, VI., 297-333, and in the graduating dis- 

 sertation of his pupil, Souza Leite (Paris, 1890). 



14 Fritsche and Klebs, "Ein Beitrag zur Pathologie des Riesenwuchses, ' ' 

 Leipzig, 1884. 



is For an interesting account of this disease, see ' ' Acromegaly, A Personal 

 Experience" (London, 1912), by Dr. Leonard Portal Mark, a practising physi- 

 cian who has given a graphic and pathetic description of the gradual onset of the 

 distressing malady in his own body. Although his disease was privately diag- 

 nosed by most of his clinical associates and he was "spotted" as an acromegalic 

 in a Parisian crowd by Marie himself, Dr. Mark did not begin to realize his con- 

 dition until he was fifty. 



