Anomalies and Curiosities of MedicineGould, George M. (George Milbrey)
Science
Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine
Gould, George M. (George Milbrey)
Abnormalities, Human; Medicine -- Anecdotes
Two creatures of celebrity were Maximo and Bartola, who for twenty-five
years have been shown in America and in Europe under the name of the
"Aztecs" or the "Aztec children". They were male and female and very
short, with heads resembling closely the bas-reliefs on the ancient
Aztec temples of Mexico. Their facial angle was about 45 degrees, and
they had jutting lips and little or no chin. They wore their hair in an
enormous bunch to magnify the deformity. These curiosities were born in
Central America and were possibly half Indian and Negro. They were
little better than idiots in point of intelligence.
Figure 92 represents a microcephalic youth known as the "Mexican wild
boy," who was shown with the Wallace circus.
Virchow exhibited a girl of fourteen whose face was no larger than that
of a new-born child, and whose head was scarcely as large as a man's
fist. Magitot reported a case of a microcephalic woman of thirty who
weighed 70 pounds.
Hippocrates and Strabonius both speak of head-binding as a custom
inducing artificial microcephaly, and some tribes of North American
Indians still retain this custom.
As a rule, microcephaly is attended with associate idiocy and arrested
development of the rest of the body. Ossification of the fontanelles in
a mature infant would necessarily prevent full development of the
brain. Osiander and others have noticed this anomaly. There are cases
on record in which the fontanelles have remained open until adulthood.
Augmentation of the volume of the head is called macrocephaly, and
there are a number of curious examples related. Benvenuti describes an
individual, otherwise well formed, whose head began to enlarge at
seven. At twenty-seven it measured over 37 inches in circumference and
the man's face was 15 inches in height; no other portion of his body
increased abnormally; his voice was normal and he was very intelligent.
He died of apoplexy at the age of thirty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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