museum, circus and country fair. Every mythology has
concerned itself with them. The Titans among the Greeks, Og, Gog
and Magog among the Hebrews, are examples of the fascination of the
superlarge. John Hunter, the founder of experimental surgery, spent a
fortune in chasing after the skeleton of a famous Irish Giant in 1783.
Dwarfs have also fascinated--witness the short-limbed satyrs of the
Greeks and the dwarf gods (Ptah and Bes) of Egypt, as well as the
vogue of the court dwarf-buffoons, of whom Velasquez has left us some
portraits. Fat people, obesity as a manifestation of personality, have
aroused wonder and amusement the world over. The Fat Boy has always
furnished good sport to the Sam Wellers.

All these characters, tall or short, fat or lean, are related to the
activity of a gland of internal secretion in the head, the pituitary,
which became a centre of interest in the late eighties. Because of its
situation, the opinion of the ancients was that it was the source of
the mucus of the nose, an opinion reinforced by the greatest anatomist
of the Dark Ages, Galen, and held up to the seventeenth century. In
other words, it was considered simply a gland of external secretion.
Experimental removal of the pituitary was essayed by Horsley in 1886,
the same man who two years before had reproduced myxedema successfully
in monkeys. Others succeeded his attempt. But the conclusions drawn
were uncertain or contradictory, resulting from the difficulties of
the operative technique of getting at a gland placed at the base
of the brain. Not until 1908 was the problem solved by Paulesco of
Bucharest, who devised a way of reaching it by trepanning the skull.
He was thus able to prove beyond a doubt that the pituitary gland was
essential to life, and that without it no animal could continue to
live for any length of time. Soon after, Harvey Gushing and his
associates at Johns Hopkins Hospital discovered that removal of part
of the gland was followed by a pronounced obesity and sluggishness.
A basis for the understanding of obesity and growth was then
established.

In the eighties, there came to the clinic of Pierre Marie in Paris,
a pupil of the great Charcot, various women complaining of headache.
They also told him about an enlargement of their hands and feet, and
an alarming change in the bones of the face. He differentiated the
affection from its imitators, and created its present designation of
"acromegaly" (enlargement of