HISTORY OF ENDOCRINE DOCTRINE 



51 



tor j. It is worth while to range these in chronological order, as illustrating 

 the slow growth of a certain phase of inductive science. 



II 



On the continent of Europe, the disease "exophthalmic goiter" is vari- 

 ously known as "Basedow's disease," or morbo di Flajani, after the two 

 observers who in Germany and Italy are thought to have originally de- 

 scribed it. In 1840 Basedow, a 

 physician of Merseburg, pub- 

 lished a description (four cases) 

 so complete that the Germans 

 regard it as the classical one. 

 The three symptoms which he 

 signalized swelling of the thy- 

 roid gland, protrusion of the eye- 

 ball, and palpitation of the heart 

 the Germans sometimes call 

 the "Merseburg triad/' which 

 they also designate by the sim- 

 ple telegraphic epithet "Base- 

 dow." To this Charcot added a 

 fourth cardinal symptom, the 

 tremor. Among English-speak- 

 ing people, following the nomen- 

 clature proposed by Trousseau, 

 the disease is called exophthal- 

 mic goiter or Graves' disease, 

 after the well-known Irish clin- 

 ician who printed an accurate 

 account of it in 1835. But, more 

 than fifty years before Basedow, 

 Caleb Hillier Parry, an eminent 

 physician of Bath, England, made a notation of all phases of the Merseburg 

 triad, part of which deserves citation, if only on account of its historic 

 interest. 



"Enlargement of the thyroid gland in connection ivith enlargement or palpitation 

 of the heart. The first case of this coincidence which I witnessed was that of Grace 

 B., a married woman, aged thirty-seven, in the month of August, 1786. Six years 

 before this period she caught cold" in lying-in, and for a month suffered under a very 

 acute rheumatic fever; subsequently to which she became subject to more or less of 

 palpitation of the heart, very much augmented by bodily exercise, and gradually in- 

 creasing in force and frequence till my attendance, when it was so vehement, that each 

 systole of the heart shook the whole thorax. Her pulse was 156 in a minute, very 

 full and hard, alike in both wrists, irregular as to strength, and intermitting at least 

 once in six beats. She had no cough, tendency to fainting or blueness of the skin, but 

 had twice or thrice been seized in the night with a sense of constriction and difficulty 



Fig. 4. Carl Adolph Basedow 

 (1799-1854) 



