64 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



ened eyelids; the depressed pug nose with its wide, thick nostrils; 

 large, erect ears; the wobbly, drooling tongue, sticking out at 

 one, yet not in derision; the hair thin, and like tow in texture 

 rather than human; eyebrows and eyelashes are scant, and often 

 absent; the nails short, thin and brittle; the teeth, very late in 

 coming, may be represented by a few sharp points, irregular, 

 decaying quickly, sometimes not succeeded at all by those of the 

 second dentition. 



Whatever growth occurs is irregular and disproportionate. The 

 trunk, though small compared with the head, appears massive 

 against the background of the diminutive extremities. The back 

 is somewhat humped, arching at the waist-line, while the abdo- 

 men protrudes like a balloon, with a hernia, often, at the navel. 

 The extremities are short, bowed, cold, and livid, covered with 

 rolls of the infiltrated skin, rolls which cannot be smoothed out. 

 Hands and feet are broad, pudgy, and floppy, the fingers stiff, 

 square and spade-like, the toes spread apart, like a duck's, by 

 the solid skin. Above the collar bones there are frequently great 

 pads of fat which sometimes encircle the narrow bull neck. 

 * The mental state varies with the degree of deprivation of the 

 internal secretion of the thyroid. In the worst cases it is repul- 

 sively vegetable. Even the intelligence common to the higher 

 animals is wanting. The cretins of the "human plant" kind, as 

 they have been nicknamed, will not recognize mother or father 

 or any person about them, or even a person from an object, and 

 manifest no interest in anything or anybody, not even toys. 

 Hunger and thirst they manifest by grunts and inarticulate 

 sounds, or by screaming. They neither smile, cough, nor laugh, 

 but sit like sphinxes, breathing, but not reacting. 



There are, of course, all grades and varieties. There are those 

 who recognize parents and familiar faces, and exhibit some evi- 

 dence of affection for them, acquire a limited vocabulary, and 

 then cease, no progress possible even with the alphabet. They 

 attain the size and age of two or three years and there stop alto- 

 gether, as if a permanent brake were applied to the wheels of 

 their growth. Some higher types may even come to speak con- 

 nected sentences, and exhibit a certain mild spontaneity, though 

 stupid nnd slow and abnormally deliberate, resembling the ac- 

 quired form of thyroid deprivation or insufficiency, for which 

 Ord invented the name myxedema. 



I have filled in with some detail this thumbnail sketch of thy- 

 roid deprivation as it occurs in infancy to illustrate how wide a 



