Word: myxedema
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Perhaps reading too far, Torrilhon detects myxedema (underactive thyroid) in the swollen eyelids, sparse lashes, dry hair and "shivering, apathetic aspect" of the bride in the renowned canvas, The Peasant Wedding. (Critic Gilbert Highet saw the bride as "a healthy, blowsy heifer," whose smirk and downcast eyes hide unseemly thoughts: "I'm glad I'm getting married. I don't much like my husband, but he is rich.") In the five sightless beggars stumbling into a ditch in the famous Parable of the Blind, Torrilhon sees a whole ophthalmological catalogue. From left to right, he diagnoses pronounced...
...Internal Myxedema. Among the common signs of a thyroid gland functioning under par are: cold, dry, rough and puffy skin; coarse, dry hair which falls out; apathetic emotions; sluggish mind. But those external signs of myxedema (atrophy of the thyroid) may be absent and internal disorders take their place. That possible inversion of symptoms is so little known that Dr. Hans Lisser of San Francisco made a stir by showing that a person's lazy insides may be prodded by thyroid treatment. Dr. Lisser's most remarkable patient suffered from ascites (abdominal dropsy); flaccid heart, intestines and bladder...
Then Harvard's Dr. William Bosworth Castle discovered why liver helped anemics. Pernicious anemia, he showed, is a deficiency disease in a category with diabetes and myxedema. In pernicious anemia the stomach fails to secrete a certain substance which as yet has not been isolated. Ordinarily that stomach secretion mixes with food, especially meats, and produces a second, unidentified substance in the intestines. There the second unknown is absorbed and gets to the arm and leg bones where it stimulates the production of red blood cells...
...Five-grain doses, or slightly less reduced fat men and women two pounds a week without exercise or diet, made them feel better and more active. The investigators suggest that this dinitrophenol dose be tried cautiously for myxedema and other phenomena of sub-functioning thyroids...
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