Word: wadlow
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Mentally and emotionally, Robert Wadlow seems to be a normal 19-year-old smalltown boy. He was a star basketball player at Alton High School. He swims well. He does not go boating because the only time he entered a rowboat he foundered it, almost drowning his father and himself. Nor can he join in social sports like tennis. He is too big to go out with girls, so he entertains himself with photography. He likes to have his little sister and brother clamber over him. He helps his mother around the house with such tall chores ar washing windows...
...Robert Wadlow could look down at Primo Camera, gargantuan prizefighter...
...body, situated under the brain, controls growth. Usually when it goes awry it affects the individual either at puberty or after he reaches maturity. Adolescent pituitary trouble makes the victim exceedingly tall and lanky. Later it makes the hands, feet and head (especially the chin) vast and ponderous. Robert Wadlow's condition started at birth. Hence his 8 ft. 6 in. and his 435 Ib. are in fairly good proportion...
...divergents from the norms of humanity started Dr. Humberd, 40, a curly-headed bookworm, on a study of gigantism. He has hats, shoes, rings and other souvenirs of most of the circus giants of the U. S. (see p. 45), but nothing so meticulous as his record cf Robert Wadlow, which he obtained only after "a lavish and continued expenditure of much cajolery, flattery, servility, wheedling and exaggerated politeness and persistence...
...giants have trouble with their feet. Robert Wadlow has no sensations of touch, pain or temperature in his feet. Says Dr. Humberd: "He is unaware of a wrinkle in his sock or a foreign body in his shoe until a blister, followed by an ulcer, is formed." His ears are oversize, his heart in proper proportion, genitalia small but normal...