THE GLANDS: THYROID AND PITUITARY 57 



of his medical advisers. Luck aids him to rise in the world, or 

 perhaps he has been born with a spoon of the precious metals in 

 his mouth. Adolescence, love and marriage dance their sequence. 

 Our hero of course keeps his dread secret to himself. Whether 

 such an omission of confidence would entitle his wife to a divorce 

 is something courts will be called upon to decide sooner or later. 

 But, without anticipating, the honeymoon involves a trip to the 

 South Seas. A storm and a wreck throws them alone on an 

 island, tropical, easy to live on, and rescue in the course of a 

 few months certain. The man, to his horror, discovers that he 

 has saved of his medicaments only a pill box containing half a 

 dozen of thyroid tablets, his requirement being one a day. He 

 sees them go day by day. Finally they are all gone. He feels 

 his faculties slipping hour by hour. Shall he tell her? Indecision 

 grips him, and he delays until the day when his consciousness 

 sinks to the point where his mind no longer grasps his problem. 

 The wife must endure the spectacle of the enchantment of her 

 husband, and his change from gallant lover to dull animal ogre. 

 A new version of Beauty and the Beast! 



Cretinism as one manifestation of a soul without thyroid or 

 without enough thyroid is not all. The first great successes with 

 thyroid were achieved in adults, particularly adult women, ex- 

 hibiting a peculiar obesity, coldness, loss of hair and teeth and a 

 remarkable lassitude and torpor that might be summed up as a 

 chronic drowsiness, like a saturation of the blood with some 

 narcotic drug. Or there may be a melancholia, or a lack of ability 

 to seize the finer points of a mental process, or an argument 

 treated in the abstract. Children are said to be lazy, slow or 

 dull. They experience an irritating difficulty in understanding 

 questions and expressing their wants and desires, and so are de- 

 clared to be vicious, or stupid. 



All these are grades of the degeneration which Ord, the English- 

 man, named myxedema. At its worst it is a sort of bloating and 

 drying of the body and the mind. Then there is infantilism, 

 which is helped by the giving of thyroid extract. It differs from 

 the ordinary cretinism in that, while one is reminded of the 

 latter by the physical stunting and the other stigmata, there is a 

 certain amount of intelligence which enables the individual to 

 hold his own while he is a child. He becomes a grown-up baby: 

 at twenty prefers the company of children of ten, and passes 

 under the evil influence of designing so-called normal persons. 

 So dominated he will lie, steal, start fires, commit almost any 



