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Updated: June 5, 2025
Bowed down by toil, stolid with ignorance, disfigured with the goitre, struck with cretinism, the miserable beings around you do more to sadden you than all that the bright air and glorious hills can do to exhilarate you. The valley where we now were was a complete cul de sac. It was walled in all round by limestone hills of great height, and the eye sought in vain for visible outlet.
Also a train of symptoms similar to those evoked by an oversecretion of the thyroid may be mobilized by the taking of too much iodine. Great sorrow, great joy, a sudden severe jolt to the nervous equilibrium, sexual excitement, an overwhelming anger or grief may leave in their wake a permanent hyperthyroidism. The symptoms are the reverse of cretinism and myxedema.
The hair becomes shaggy and rough, losing all luster, and tends to grow irregularly and fall out. The temperature becomes subnormal and an anemia supervenes. There is a distinct reduction in the resistance to infections and intoxications. Cretinism in the human is a condition in which the burning taper we call Life flickers and smoulders and smokes.
At Ivrea, I entered the interesting valley of Aosta. The whole valley, fifty miles in length, is inhabited by miserable looking people, nearly one half of them being afflicted with goitre and cretinism. They looked more idiotic and disgusting than any I have ever seen, and it was really painful to behold such miserable specimens of humanity dwelling amid the grandest scenes of nature.
Thyroid deficiency in children gives rise to a form of idiocy, bodily malformation and degeneracy known as cretinism, while in adult life it is associated with a similar disorder known as myxedema.
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, exhibiting 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.
She aids in the pecuniary and moral ruin of the Hulot family, acts in cold blood, and attains her object before she dies. She is not the only perverted nature delineated. There is the Baron Hulot, whose odious licentiousness brings him to a veritable cretinism.
The functions of the thoracic and abdominal organs seem to be normal, and death is generally due to some intercurrent disease, possibly tuberculosis. A condition akin to myxedema occurs after operative removal of the thyroid gland. In a most interesting lecture Brissaud shows the intimate relation between myxedema, endemic cretinism, sporadic cretinism, or myxedematous idiocy, and infantilism.
One can endure the militarism of Germany and the bureaucracy of Austria; but it is revolting to see decent Italian countryfolk at the mercy of these uncouth savages, veritable cave-men, whose only intelligible expression is one of malice striving to break through a crust of congenital cretinism. We hear much of the great artists and speculative philosophers of old Italy.
The socialist recognizes that the parliaments of to-day represent class interests, that, indeed, they are dominated by class interests, and, as such, that they do not seek to change but to conserve what now exists. As a result, there is a parliamentary crétinism, because, in a sense, the dominant elements in Parliament are only managing the affairs of powerful influences outside of Parliament.
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