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. Moebius,
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 patient, a Mrs. H., was shown before the
Northcumberland and Durham Medical Society, an English country medical
organization, in February, 1891. She was forty-two years old and had
borne nine children. The illness attacking her had begun insidiously,
with a gradual enlargement and thickening of her face and hands.
She had become very slow in speech and gait, sensitive to cold, and
languid and depressed in spirit to the point of inability to go about
alone. Murray, employing the glycerin extract of the thyroid gland of
a freshly killed sheep, injected twenty-four drops hypodermically,
twice a week. There was an immediate and marvelous improvement, which
continued steadily, Murray finding that it could be maintained by
feeding the gland by mouth. The features and skin returned to the
normal, speech quickened and she became able to walk about and live
her life without hesitation or assistance. She lived to the age of
seventy-four, dying in 1919. In the twenty-eight years, during which
it was always necessary to administer the thyroid, she consumed over
nine pints of thyroid, comprising the glands of 870 sheep.

Giants and dwarfs and fat people have always interested people as
freaks, departures from the usual and the normal, and have formed the
stock of popular