The Ductless Glandular Diseases

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE CRETINIC DEGENERATION The enormous social significance of the cretinic degeneration in the countries affected by it may be seen by the glimpse of the following figures, which I take for the most part from the works of Ewald and E. Bircher. In Switzerland 7.2 per cent, of the applicants for...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE CRETINIC DEGENERATION The enormous social significance of the cretinic degeneration in the countries affected by it may be seen by the glimpse of the following figures, which I take for the most part from the works of Ewald and E. Bircher. In Switzerland 7.2 per cent, of the applicants for military service must be rejected on account of goiter, and 2 per cent, must later be discharged. In Cisleithania there occurred for every 100,000 inhabitants 71 cretins; in many strongly infested districts, for example, in Murrau. in the Steiermark, there are more than lo00 cretins per 100.000 inhabitants. In France, in 1873. there were about i per cent, goitrous among the inhabitants and 0.3 per cent, cretins and idiots; in Piedmont in 1883 about 0.15 per cent, of cretins; in Lombardy 0.2 per cent., etc. The etiology of this affection is not as yet explained. The study of the geographical distribution shows that goiter, goiter heart, endemic cretinism, and endemic mutism belong together. Typical Basedow's disease is rare in goitrous districts. Manifestations of hyperthyrosis are commonly found there combined with those of goiter heart. The parallelism in the distribution of endemic mutism with that of endemic cretinism are convincingly shown by the investigations of Bircher for Switzerland and the statistics of ?. Wagner for Austria. For lower France there are the observations of Lobeoltojfer. The group relationship of goiter and endemic cretinism is not only seen in the fact that the cretins are almost always goiter carriers, but also through the almost unexceptional occurrence of goiters in the ancestry of the cretins. This and other established facts point to a common etiological factor in the different forms of the cretinic degeneration. As to this all observers agree. ...