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Updated: May 18, 2025
Near by a young girl gave suck to a deformed infant, lucky to have survived its birth; her neck was as big as her breasts merely a case of goitre. Coolies passed, panting and puffing, all casting a curious glance at him to whose beneficence all were willing to pander. At tiffin I counted thirty-three wretched people, who turned out to see the barbarian.
The result of all this is the development of characters as deformed as are the bodies of victims to hydrocephalus or goitre; while, in painful contrast to such victims, these morally distorted patients bear about their deformities in the most conspicuous manner, as if they were rare beauties.
Here and there we passed Cszeks and slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves.
A dirty little place; the male inhabitants are nearly all in America; the old women nearly all afflicted with goitre. I was pleased to observe the Calabrian system of the house-doors, which life in civilized places had made me forget. These doors are divided into two portions, not vertically like ours, but horizontally. The system testifies to social instincts and a certain sense of refinement.
Despite the fertility of the country, poverty and starvation met us at every step; the poor were lingering miserably through the year. Goitre, too, was increasing in frequency. It was rarely that a group gathered to see us some of whose members were not suffering from this horrible deformity. And everywhere in the pretty country were signs of the ruthless devastation of religious war.
"The pest of society is egotism. This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder.
Day, ever full of compassion for the weak and oppressed, was kind and gentle to her. She was generally breathless with hurry and the trouble of the goitre, and Mrs. Day took no special notice of her panting condition now. "What for you to-night, Alice?" she asked her. "It's soap," Alice gasped.
One wretched hovel succeeded another. Yonder before a door, Wilhelm the idiot, on whom the city boys played their pranks, smiled into vacancy just as foolishly as he had done twenty years ago, here lodged Kathrin, with the big goitre, who swept the gutters; in the three grey huts, from which hung numerous articles of ragged clothing, lived two families of charcoal-burners, and Caspar, the juggler, a strange man, whom as a boy he had seen in the pillory, with his deformed daughters, who in winter washed laces and in summer went with him to the fairs.
They helped to make the hay on the marshes beyond the village, and they greatly outnumbered the men in the labors of the vintage. They were seldom pretty either in face or figure; they seemed all to have some stage of goitre; but their manners were charming, and their voices, as I have said, angelically sweet.
Since the above was written, we have had an opportunity of consulting Sir Stamford Raffles' History of Java. He found goitre prevalent in both Java and Sumatra, but is careful to explain that it was observed in certain mountainous districts.
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