physical and mental deterioration. He started the ball rolling
for a number of researches.

Moritz Schiff, of Frankfort-on-the-Main, showed that excision of the
thyroid gland in dogs is invariably fatal. A number of physicians in
the first half of the century had reported certain remarkable symptoms
associated with enlargement of the thyroid gland, as goitre. In 1825
the collected posthumous writings of Caleb Perry, an eminent physician
of Bath, England, recorded eight cases, in which, together with
enlargement of the gland, there developed enlargement and palpitation
of the heart, a distinct protrusion of the eyes from their sockets and
an appearance of agitation and distress. Schiff's paper was the first
to throw any light on the subject. But for some reason, probably the
same as in Berthold's forlorn experiments with the sex glands, the
work of a person of no importance was ignored, or perhaps the more
charitable view is that it was forgotten. Yet the tide of observation
kept sweeping in relevant data.

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 thyroid 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 conviction of the connection between them. Then Schiff, in
1884, neglected twenty-five years, came back, with an array of
demonstrations, proving that the various symptoms, tremors, spasms and
convulsions, following removal of the thyroid, could be prevented 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