In 1850, Curling, an English pathologist, studying the cretinous idiots of Salzburg, written about centuries before by Paracelsus, discovered that with their defective brain and mentality there was associated an absence of the thyroid body, and accompanying symmetrical swellings of fat tissue at the sides of the neck.  Then Sir William Gull in 1873 painted the singular details of a cretinous condition developing in adult women, a condition to which another Englishman, William Ord, of London, five years later donated the title of myxedema, because of a characteristic thickening and infiltration of the skin that is one of its features.

Surgery then enters upon the scene.  The great Swiss surgeon.  Theodore Kocher, performed the first excision of the thyroid gland in human beings for goitre, in the same year.  In 1882, J.L.  Reverdin, another surgeon of Geneva, noticed that in man complete removal of the thyroid was followed by symptoms identical with those collected under the name of myxedema, and used the phrase “operative myxedema” to emphasize his conviction of the connection between them.  Then Schiff, in 1884, neglected twenty-five years, came back, with an array of demonstrations, proving that the various symptoms, tremors, spasms and convulsions, following removal of the thyroid, could be prevented by a previous graft of a piece of the gland under the skin, or by the injection of thyroid juice into a vein or under the skin, or by the ingestion of thyroid juice or the raw thyroid by mouth.

A crystallization of ideas about the true function of the thyroid was now inevitable.  In 1884, Sir Victor Horsley produced an experimental myxedema by removal of the thyroid in monkeys, resembling closely in its symptom-picture the disease as it occurs in human beings.  Moebius, a German neurologist, came out boldly for the conception that a number of ailments could be due to qualitative and quantitative changes in the secretion of the thyroid, and that just as myxedema and cretinism were due to an insufficiency of the secretion, Parry’s disease was to be ascribed to an excessive outpouring of it.  The next steps were easy.  In 1888, Sir Felix Semon, as an outcome of a collective investigation, established for all time that cretinism, myxedema and post-operative myxedema were one and the same.

It was bound to occur to someone that if human myxedema and animal experimental myxedema were one and the same, Schiff’s procedure of prevention and cure by feeding thyroid gland by mouth in the latter could be applied to the former.  The idea occurred to two men, Murray and Howitz, in 1891.  Murray’s patient, a Mrs. H., was shown before the Northcumberland and Durham Medical Society, an English country medical organization, in February, 1891.  She was forty-two years old and had borne nine children.  The illness attacking her had begun insidiously, with a gradual enlargement and thickening of her face and hands.  She had become very slow in speech and gait, sensitive