HOW THE GLANDS WERE DISCOVERED 39 



In 1850, Curling, an English pathologist, studying the cretinous 

 idiots of Salzburg, written about centuries before by Paracelsus, 

 discovered that with their defective brain and mentality there 

 was associated an absence of the thyroid body, and accompanying 

 symmetrical swellings of fat tissue at the sides of the neck. 

 Then Sir William Gull in 1873 painted the singular details of a 

 cretinous condition developing in adult women, a condition to 

 which another Englishman, William Ord, of London, five years 

 later donated the title of myxedema, because of a characteristic 

 thickening and infiltration of the skin that is one of its features. 



Surgery then enters upon the scene. The great Swiss surgeon. 

 Theodore Kocher, performed the first excision of the thyroia 

 gland in human beings for goitre, in the same year. In 1882, 

 J. L. Reverdin, another surgeon of Geneva, noticed that in man 

 complete removal of the thyroid was followed by symptoms 

 identical with those collected under the name of myxedema, and 

 used the phrase "operative myxedema" to emphasize his convic- 

 tion of the connection between them. Then Schiff, in 1884, 

 neglected twenty-five years, came back, with an array of dem- 

 onstrations, proving that the various symptoms, tremors, spasms 

 and convulsions, following removal of the thyroid, could be pre- 

 vented by a previous graft of a piece of the gland under the skin, 

 or by the injection of thyroid juice into a vein or under the skin, 

 or by the ingestion of thyroid juice or the raw thyroid by mouth. 



A crystallization of ideas about the true function of the thyroid 

 was now inevitable. In 1884, Sir Victor Horsley produced an 

 experimental myxedema by removal of the thyroid in monkeys, 

 resembling closely in its symptom-picture the disease as it 

 occurs in human beings. Mobius, a German neurologist, came 

 out boldly for the conception that a number of ailments could 

 be due to qualitative and quantitative changes in the secretion of 

 the thyroid, and that just as myxedema and cretinism were due 

 to an insufficiency of the secretion, Parry's disease was to be 

 ascribed to an excessive outpouring of it. The next steps were 

 easy. In 1888, Sir Felix Semon, as an outcome of a collective 

 investigation, established for all time that cretinism, myxedema 

 and post-operative myxedema were one and the same. 



It was bound to occur to someone that if human myxedema 

 and animal experimental myxedema were one and the same, 

 Schiff 's procedure of prevention and cure by feeding thyroid gland 

 by mouth in the latter could be applied to the former. The idea 

 occurred to two men, Murray and Howitz, in 1891. Murray's 



