Cretinism at Aosta 



rooms, thousands of skulls are arranged on shelves 

 like specimens in a museum. Some of them reveal 

 sword cuts and bullet holes that the spiders have 

 vainly tried for fifty years to heal. 



At Novara the pyramidal pile of skulls, which in 

 1890 (when my wife and I visited the place) stood on 

 the edge of the wheatfield where the battle was 

 mainly fought, had been removed nearer to the city, 

 on the street down which the soldiers of the un- 

 fortunate Charles Albert were pursued by the 

 Austrians, who forced him to abdicate the throne to his 

 son, Victor Emmanuel. The gruesome relics are now 

 placed in rows on the sides of a deep pit, the skeleton 

 of a tall grenadier standing upright in the midst. 



We next broke our journey at Aosta that I might 

 again study the cretins (cretins), a type of idiot found 

 in different Alpine regions, in Frohnleiten in Styria, 

 and in parts of Valais, but most numerous at Aosta, 

 " famous for its mountains and infamous for its 

 idiots." Here startling results had been produced by 

 the preservation and selective breeding of paupers, breeding 

 This peculiar type of idiocy has existed for a long 

 time, and its original cause is not yet fully known. 

 Always associated with goiter, a swelling of de- 

 generated thyroid glands in cause also uncer- 

 tain it is usually thought to be due to absence of 

 iodine in water, but this I believe not yet proved. 

 The tendency to develop goiter seems to be hered- 

 itary. Nearly all children attacked by it become 

 idiots; adults who acquire it may not be mentally 

 affected. 



In 1897 I wrote certain paragraphs which follow, 

 interesting perhaps for the very fact that former 

 conditions no longer prevail, as will shortly appear: 



C 313 3 



