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Updated: June 22, 2025
It is among the specimens of normality of the brain cells that we may look for our examples of endocrine mental deficiency. Included are all sorts of examples of feeble-mindedness varying from the moron to the imbecile and idiot, arrested brain life. The cretin is the classic type of mental deficiency due to endocrine insufficiency, curable or improvable by the proper handling.
It is a fact, which all who have long had charge of either cretins or idiots well understand, that a great degree of physical deformity and disorder, a strongly marked rachitic condition of the body, complicated even with loss of hearing and speech, may exist, while the intellectual powers are but slightly affected; in other words, that a child may be in external appearance a cretin, and even one of low grade, yet with a higher degree of intellectual capacity than most cretins possess.
"When the space on which the houses stand has been grubbed up, it will mean at least another acre of meadow land for us; and furthermore, there will be a clear saving to the Commune of the hundred francs that it used to cost to keep Chautard the cretin."
Unable to walk, usually deaf and dumb, with bleared eyes, and head of disproportionate size, brown, flabby, and leprous skin, a huge goitre descending from the throat and resting upon the breast, an abdomen enormously distended, the lower limbs crooked, weak, and ill-shaped, without the power of utterance, or thoughts to utter, and generally incapable of seeing, not from defect of the visual organs, but from want of capacity to fix the eye upon any object, the cretin seems beyond the reach of human sympathy or aid.
If, following an infectious disease, a child has wasting of this gland, or if, living in a certain district, it has a large goitre, normal development does not take place, and the child does not grow in mind or body and becomes what is called a cretin.
And when fate compels us to leave our mountains we are pursued by restlessness. We know no peace, no home elsewhere. We do assume the airs of Victor Hugo's cretin when we are placed face to face with the riches of Croesus or the splendours of Pharaoh. We must reluctantly admit that the phenomenon of cold indifference to mountain scenery may occur without any corresponding degree of idiocy.
Another was 'a wretched crétin of the name of Gibbs, who was always glad to come and booze at the college port a week or two when his vote was wanted in support of college abuses. The description of a third, who still survives, is veiled by editorial charity behind significant asterisks. That Pattison should be popular with such a gang was impossible.
I could not learn whether it was necessary that both parents should have goitres, to produce cretin children: indeed the want of chastity in the half-breed women would be a bar to the deduction of any inference on this head."
At the village of Huanglien-pu, where I had lunch, the landlady of the inn had a goitrous neck that was swelled out half-way to the shoulder, and her son was a slobbering-mouthed cretin with the intelligence of an animal. And among the people who gathered round me in a dull, apathetic way every other one was more or less marked with the disease and its attendant mental phenomena.
The cretin begins to grow mentally and physically and loses to a large extent the grotesqueness of his appearance. He grows taller; his tongue no longer lolls in his mouth; the hair becomes finer, the hands less coarse, and the patient exhibits more normal human emotions, purposes, intelligence.
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