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Updated: June 22, 2025
To understand fully what was to be accomplished, in order to transform the young cretin into an active, healthy child, it is necessary that we should glance at his physical and mental condition, when placed under treatment. Cretinism seems to be a combination of two diseases, the one physical, the other mental.
The people in the uncle's house, looked, thank heaven, like those whom Rudy was accustomed to see. But one cretin was there, a poor silly lad, one of the many miserable creatures, who on account of their poverty and need, always make their home among the families of Canton Valais and remain with each but a couple of months. The wretched Saperli happened to be there when Rudy arrived.
Doctor Guggenbühl was led to select it as much for this reason as for its salubrity, in the belief, which his subsequent experience has fully justified, that the striking nobleness of the landscape would awaken, even in the torpid mind of the cretin, that sense of the beautiful in Nature which would materially aid in his intellectual culture.
Late in the evening he returned home with the fatal news, to that home which was now to be so full of sorrow. His uncle's wife uttered not a word, nor shed a tear, till the corpse was brought in; then her agony burst forth. The poor cretin crept away to his bed, and nothing was seen of him during the whole of the following day.
The osseous structure, deficient in the phosphate of lime, is unable to sustain the weight of the body, and the cretin is thus incapacitated for active motion; the muscles are soft and wasted; the skin dingy, cold, and unhealthy; the appetite voracious; spasmodic and convulsed action frequent; and the digestion imperfect and greatly disordered.
In the midst of this terrific picture of want sat a crétin, with his semi-human attributes, the lolling tongue, the blunted faculties, and the degraded appetites, to complete the desolation. Issuing from this belt of annihilated vegetation, the scene became again as pleasant as the fancy could desire, or the eye crave.
Cretinism is an endemic disease among mountainous people who drink largely of lime water, and is characterized by a condition of physical, physiologic, and mental degeneracy and nondevelopment, and possibly goiter. The subjects of this disease seldom reach five feet in height, and usually not more than four. The word cretin is derived from the Latin creatura. They are found all over the world.
At seventeen months the child presented the typical appearance of a sporadic cretin. The astonishing results of six months' treatment with thyroid extract are shown in the second figure. After a year's treatment the child presents the appearance of a healthy and well-nourished little girl. Myxedema proper is a constitutional condition due to the loss of the function of the thyroid gland.
The cretin's friends were there before me, and in front of his hovel I found a crowd of women and children and old people, who hailed my arrival with insults accompanied by a shower of stones. "In the midst of the uproar I should perhaps have fallen a victim to the frenzy that possesses a crowd excited by its own outcries and stirred up by one common feeling, but the cretin saved my life!
I had gained the good opinion of every one in that matter of the last cretin; and when I had constantly shown that I could rule both mildly and firmly, I became a local oracle.
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