Excerpta.

Kaikoura Star, Volume XIV, Issue 749, 22 June 1894, Page 7

Excerpta.

§ A Curious Disease and its Cure.

‘ Myxoadema ’ is a horrible and loath - some disease, sometimes referred to as ‘ sporadic cretinism.’ The symptoms are a scurfy growth all over the skin, accompanied by the falling out of the hair, but the chief feature is a gradual loss of strength and development of the most painful kind of idiotcy, ending in death.

Patients suffering from this complaint were formerly stuffed away in asylums by relations who were only too glad to conceal them. Now such patients are restored to health and sanity in the course of a few months, by a process which is simply marvellous.

The history of the cure is as follows. Previously to 1859 the action of the thyroid glands in the throat was an unsolved mystery. Patients suffering from goitre were in many cases treated by removing this gland, and in all cases they died. Schiff, of Geneva, a most emi'nent physiologist, experimented with dogs to see whether it was the removal of the thyroid gland that caused death, and it was. In rabbits the test appeared to fail, because it was not known till later that rabbits possess four glands instead of two. The settlement of this question in animals, by an invariable law, settled also the fact that the thyroid gland was vital in man. Horsley took up Schiff’s work, and experimented with more highly developed animals—namely, monkeys. He then discovered that loss of the thyroid gland produced myxosdema in monkeys, and that they died of it. He succeeded, however, by grafting in a thyroid gland from a sheep in curing the disease and averting death. Acting upon a suggestion that probably the gland secreted something that was necessary to life, young Dr George Murray, of Newcastle, first tried the experiment of injecting into a myxasdema patient an extract of the thyroid gland of a sheep. The result was successful. The final step was achieved when it was found that a patient need only swallow this extract j and ‘ thyroid tabloids ’ have now become article of pharmacopoeia. Thus, hundreds of people, mostly women, and in all classes of life, have been saved from a lingering death of the most awful description from the slow and conscious growth of idiotcy, and from confinement in asylums, which is ■imply living death. In one single asylum near Lyons there were 40 such patients, all of whom have been cured and discharged. The cure is so rapid and miraculovs, even the hair returning, that doctors frequently fail to recognise their own patients after a week or two of the treatment. What have the anti-vivisectiomsts to say to this ?

Curious Meeting at Sea.

Captain Danwell, of the British ship Astoria 1335 tons, which arrived from Liverpool at Esquiinalt (8.C.) the other day, reported that off Cape Horn he sighted a vessel which on being spoken proved to be the barque Silver Stream, from N. Z. to London. The Silver Stream was also commanded by a Captain Danwell and the ships hoveto while the two brothers, who had not met for many years, spent a lew hours in each other’s society. ******

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