Word: thyroids
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are four basic types of goitre- simple goitre (simple enlargement of the thyroid gland in the neck), toxic goitre, exophthalmic (popeye) goitre, and cancer of the thyroid. Nobody knows the specific cause of any of them. Pathologists know that it has something to do with lack of iodine, hormone imbalance or germs. The difficulty is especially perplexing in the case of exophthalmic goitre. This is the most dramatic type, giving the victim's features an expression of terror, his heart palpitations, and his disposition the fidgets...
Last week Dr. John Theodore King of Baltimore argued that at least exophthalmic goitre is intimately connected with chronic tonsillitis. His thesis: the lymph channels of the thyroid and the lymph glands of the neck (including the tonsils) are closely interconnected. This is a newly discovered fact. Through these lymphatic channels any infection of the neck can spread and affect the sympathetic nervous system which serves the neck and eye sockets. All this led Dr. King to suspect that the most frequently infected gland of the neck, the tonsils, might be the cause of exophthalmic goitre...
...living human body. . . . Organs removed from the human body, in the course of an operation or soon after death, could be revived in the Lindbergh pump, and made to function again when perfused with an artificial fluid. . . . When larger apparatus are built, entire human organs, such as pancreas, suprarenal, thyroid, and other glands . . . would manufacture in vitro the substances supplied today to patients by horses or rabbits...
...other applications of the method. For instance, diseased organs could be removed from the body and placed in the Lindbergh pump as patients are placed in a hospital. Then they could be treated far more energetically than within the organism, and if cured replanted in the patient. A thyroid extirpated in the course of an operation ... a kidney removed for tuberculosis, or a leg amputated for osteosarcoma, would perhaps heal under the influence of an artificial medium when living in vitro. The replantation would offer no difficulty, as surgical techniques for the suture of blood vessels and the transplantation...
...hear scientific talk of "giant molecules." But molecules, infinitesimally tiny as they are by ordinary standards, vary greatly in size. Molecular weight of ethyl alcohol, for example, is 46 units; * of sodium chloride (salt), 58.5; of the hormone secretin, 5,000; of hemoglobin, about 68,000; of the thyroid substance thyroglobulin, about 700,000. Dr. Wendell Meredith Stanley and his associates at the Rockefeller Institute have crystallized the virus which causes mosaic disease in tobacco, found that it weighs 17,000,000 units (TIME, Nov.15). A rabbit wart virus was found to weigh 20,000,000 units, a horse encephalitis...