Читать книгу Old Age Deferred. The causes of old age and its postponement by hygienic and therapeutic measures онлайн

98 страница из 141

Evidence founded on experiments is at our disposal to prove our assertion that irregularities of the thyroid are inherited by offspring. Professor Lanz,^[114] of Amsterdam, formerly an assistant of Professor Kocher in Bern, has extirpated the thyroid gland of goats, and he found that in each case the young of such animals, as compared with normal kids of the same age, remained backward in growth. There can thus be no doubt that the qualities of the ductless glands of the parents are inherited by their descendants.

We often find diseases of the various ductless glands present among members of the same families. We can trace, not infrequently, diabetes, Graves’s disease, etc., and acromegaly, occurring in different members of the same family, and this will be observed most often in the case of diabetes and Graves’s disease. Thus I have observed in the case of two fathers (coming from the same city in Hungary, but belonging to different nationalities) diabetes, and their daughters had protuberant eyes; they had a small goiter, and the typical fingers characteristic of Graves’s disease, emaciated and pointed like those of the Madonna of Perugino, which have been mentioned already by other authors as symptoms of Graves’s disease. There was no tachycardia as yet in either of these two cases which had Graves’s disease. Very probably any mental shock, as in so many other cases, would here have caused sudden development into Graves’s disease.