GIGANTISM 



821 



merit of trunk and extremities. The cranial portion of his skull was 

 small in proportion to the face but his hands and feet though large were 

 proportional to the body. The tongue was long and thick but not too 

 broad. The lips were thick. The muscles were hypotonic, poorly devel- 

 oped and weak. There were 

 two interesting congenital anom- 

 alies in the left eye persistence 

 of the pupillary membrane of 

 Wagendorff and ectropium uvse. 



The authors point out that 

 this case demonstrated the truth 

 of the statement made long ago 

 by Launois and Roy : all giants 

 who are not acromegalic are 

 prone to become so. In his 

 youth this man probably had 

 been an infantile giant. The 

 acromegalic features consisted 

 principally in the thickening of 

 the soft parts. The size of the 

 sella turcica could not be de- 

 termined as no successful radio- 

 gram was obtained. 



This case, occurring in a vic- 

 tim of congenital syphilis, is al- Fig. 6. Giant, Palozzi. (After Levi and 



lied to those reported by Fuchs Franchini , Icon g- de la Salpetriere. ) 

 (man 26 years old, height 18S 



cm. with many stigmata of syphilis, entirely beardless) and that of Sirena 

 (a necropsied Egyptian giant of 240 cm. who died of nephritis at the age of 

 20 years. His weight at death was 218 kg. The head was deformed, with 

 marked bony changes ascribed to syphilis. The head weighed 8300 grams. 

 Splanchnomegaly was extreme ; the heart weighing 890 grams, spleen 875 

 grams, kidneys 870 grams, and liver 4070 grams). 5 



Gigantism and Leontiasis Ossea 



On the borderland of acromegalic gigantism we have a few remark- 

 able cases of giants with hyperostoses of cranial and facial bones, the de- 

 formities of the latter giving to the face a "leonine" appearance, hence the 



8 The disturbances of growth, including general and localized gigantism as well 

 as dwarfism, dependent on inherited syphilis, are exhaustively discussed in E. Four- 

 nier's Paris thesis of 1898. 



