The Clinical Review (Volume 7) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Cbe Clinical IReview. VOL. VII. NOVEMBER, 1897. NO. 2. P/EDlATRlC CLlNlC. ByW. S. Christopher, M. D. Professor of Diseases of Children, Chicago Policlinic; Professor of Pediatrics, College of Physicians and Surgeon, Chicago. (Lecture delivered at the Chicago Policlinic, Aug. 7th, 1897.) Case I. Gentlemen, this little girl, Theresa D., is the cretin that was brought in four days ago. The history of the case we took rather fully and found the following state of affairs: She is now five years and four months old. weighs 29] pounds,Laked, is 3l inches high, looks as though she were two years old, and presents well-marked evidences of cretinism in the extremely stocky build (as shown by the photographs here), and the thick, heavy extremities, the pendulous abdomen, the lordosis and the sluggish mental condition. We also find in her nutritional history evidence from the feeding that she had during infancy an insufficiency of fat in her food. She was fed at the breast for six months, then upon condensed milk exclusively for two years. She likes fruit, meat and potatoes, and these have since been her principal articles of diet. The deficiency in the fat feeding', as shown by the history, is confirmed by the examination. For instance, she has such rachitic signs as a curvature of the spinal column, slight beading of the ribs and there is also a history of very slow dentition, her first tooth erupting at nine months, and all of them not until three years. She did not walk until she was twenty-two months old, although in a case like this the delayed walking cannot be considered a rachitic sign for the reason that the condition of cretinism would also delay walking, cretinism resembling in many ways a prolonged infancy. She began talking at two years and is said to have tal...