HISTOKY OF EKDOCKIKE DOCTRINE 



53 



ings of fat tissue at the sides of the neck, connected with defective cere- 

 bral development" (1850). The classical account of this condition is due 

 to Sir William Gull (1873). It was called myxedema by William M. Ord, 

 of London, in 1877, on the ground that "the whole collection of symptoms 

 are related as effects to jelly-like swelling of the connective tissue." The 

 small size of the thyroid gland in myxedema was first emphasized by W. 

 B. Hadden (1882). In 1902 F. Pineles (a,) clearly differentiated the orig- 

 inal endemic or familial cretin- 

 ism associated with goiter (of 

 Paracelsus) from sporadic cre- 

 tinism (congenital myxedema). 



It is a curious fact that the 

 same volume of the journal in 

 which Basedow published his 

 account of exophthalmic goiter 

 contains an observation by Bern- 

 hard Mohr (1840), a privat do- 

 cent at Wiirzburg, of a remark- 

 able and fatal obesity in a gar- 

 dener's elderly wife, attended by 

 incipient imbecility (lappisches 

 und kindisches Benehmen), loss 

 of memory, general somnolence, 

 and scotoma, which, coming to 

 autopsy, revealed a tumor-like 

 degeneration of the pituitary 

 body, produced by inmixture 

 and copious effusion of a serous 

 fluid, the discharge of which had 

 induced pressure phenomena in 



reference to the adjacent parts of the brain. This was the first recorded 

 case of what is now known as pituitary obesity, the "dystrophia adiposo- 

 genitalis" of Frohlich (1901) and Frankl-Hochwart (1904). 



The disease, tetany, now mainly associated with the parathyroid glands, 

 and originally described by S. L. Steinheim (1830) and J. B. H. Dance 

 (1831), was experimentally studied by Armand Trousseau in 1851 and 

 named by Lucien Corvisart in 1852. The maternal and lactational tetany 

 of Trousseau (contractures des nourrices) had already been noted by Stem- 

 heim and Dance. To Trousseau is due the diagnostic sign of spasm upon 

 compression of the nerve trunks of a. limb, and to Chvostek the facial 

 spasm upon tapping the facial nerve. 



In spite of the amount of original clinical delineation already on rec- 

 ord in the first half of the nineteenth century, these lesions of the ductless 

 glands attracted little attention. More interest was excited by the appear- 



Fig. 5. Thomas Addison 

 (1793-1860) 



