THYROID WONDER

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2242, 22 February 1921, Page 3

THYROID WONDER

Scientists and welfare workers arc deeply interested in the outcome of an operation performed on a 19-vear-old girl, Mary Zenbee. whom the Humane Society’s agents discovered in a Chicago cellar. She is deformed in body and mind, and has been kept since infancy in semidarkness by her parents, who are ashamed of her;

The agents, says the New York correspondent of the Daily Mail, took the girl, who looked as if she were only eight years old, to the American Hospital, where she was examined by several physicians, including Dr. Krumholz, Professor oJ: Neurology at the North-Western University. The professor declared that the girl had been born with an improperly developed thyroid gland (situated behind the Adam’s apple, and responsible when atrophied before birth for sporadic cretinism, or idiocy). Emissaries from the hospital accosted an Italian organ-grinder and purchased his monkey. The monkey was hurried to the hospital, where he was invited to step forward from the hinterland of evolution and contribute his gland. He was shaved, anaesthetised, and the thyroid gland was grafted on Mary Zenbee. Dr. Krumholz described the operation as a simple one. “Mary,” he said, “has the mind of an eight-years-old child, but "ill now probably develop a normal mentality and gradually acquire the intelligence becoming her actual age, though she will haye to he taught ns any eight-years-old girl would.”