Also, mentioned at the end of tonight's episode of QI.
I've had difficulty in knowing whether I should, or should not, post this.
My reason for being so unsure is that there is so much laughing and joking against the background of thyroid issues including cretinism.
On the one hand it can feel wrong to post. On the other hand it is as well to understand how some see it. And, on that famous third hand, it isn't down to me to hide it away.
Some of the information is good, some questionable.
If you are feeling delicate - please don't listen.
I have written to the program making several points. I've tried to explain and not just be a grumpy humourless listener with a chip on my shoulder. And it just might be that, despite my reservations, the program does actually spread the word about thyroid issues a bit further.
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It was in the end titles/fade out of this week's episode of QI XL that they mentioned this program - rather than discussing the thyroid within the QI program itself.
It starts around 28 minutes in and continues for about 15 or so minutes.
I tried to get my computer to do voice recognition but quality (actual audio quality and talking over each other and some poor pronunciation) made it terribly bad!
Computer transcription (poor quality):
Re the word "cretin" - "... anyway very serious developmental problems. The normal feature didn’t grow properly. A lot of them were deaf and mute and there was a Swiss commission. There were schools across the country for deaf, mute children as it really wasn’t a national health disaster, because of this thought was really interesting because obviously became extensive, but originally it came from an Alpine dialect word Chrétien because it was so common in the Alps an Alpine dialect for Christian, and it was to remind people that these people who looked often so in a lot of deformities to remind people that they were still human Christian, people who were equally loved by God thought that might have been evidence that humans don’t have a soul, because what he saw was that when you gave this chemical to people, suddenly they became more humans as he saw it. "
It refers to:
What I Believe (Russell) by Bertrand Russell
NATURE AND MAN
Of this physical world, uninteresting in itself, Man is a part. His body, like other matter, is composed of electrons and protons, which, so far as we know, obey the same laws as those not forming part of animals or plants. There are some who maintain that physiology can never be reduced to physics, but their arguments are not very convincing and it seems prudent to suppose that they are mistaken. What we call our "thoughts" seem to depend upon the organization of tracks in the brain in the same sort of way in which journeys depend upon roads and railways. The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin; for instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure. If this be so, we cannot suppose that a solitary electron or proton can "think"; we might as well expect a solitary individual to play a football match. We also cannot suppose that an individual's thinking survives bodily death, since that destroys the organization of the brain, and dissipates the energy which utilized the brain-tracks.
Says we need 15 thousandths of a gram of iodine a day. True figure being 150 millionths. (That is, official figures are usually around 150 micrograms.)
Voice recognition version of a bit:
"Ice Age Switzerland covered in thick glaciers and it melted and then refreeze loads and loads of times right just absolutely ripped off the top 250 m of rock and soil from the Swiss plateau, and wherever the ice she was, the soil was stripped of a chemical which was iodine and the lack of iodine is what causes goitres."
Around 30% of 19 year old military recruits in Switzerland (I think in 1921) had goitres. Not recognised because of widespread use of clothing to cover up necks - but had to strip for medicals.
Mention of Derbyshire neck.
So - possibly one of the longest and most densely thyroid focussed programs I've ever come across on a general interest program (other than specific thyroid things like YouTube videos).
Thank you for that. I hope it didn't take hours to create this post or that you didn't have to write any transcriptions.
I heard of Derbyshire neck when I was quite young, but wasn't aware that the Swiss had a goitre problem too. The reason I heard about Derbyshire neck was because my mother told me the boyfriend she had before she met my father had a goitre. The man with the goitre (I have no idea how big it was) and my mother wanted to marry but her parents forbade her from doing so, due to the goitre. Ironically enough, my mother developed hypothyroidism herself later in life, I think her sister had it too, and I have it. So avoiding the man with the goitre didn't really appear to make much difference to the family - we were destined to have thyroid problems anyway!
The James Lind library paper is always worth a glance - wherein they discuss Austria (Tyrol) - which is pretty much contiguous with Switzerland, and Shakespeare.
The history of the thyroid gland goes back millennia. Its name derives from the Greek, θυριοs, a shield, because of the shield-like shape of the tracheal cartilage there. Its long history is inseparable from that of goitre – Latin guttur, neck or throat – for there must always have been people with goitrous swollen necks. August Hirsch in his monumental three-volume work, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, provides many past references worldwide to endemic goitre and endemic cretinism, notably prevalent in mountain valley regions but absent in coastal regions (Hirsch 1885). Amongst these – and suggestive evidence of a general public awareness of goitre – is Juvenal in the early 2nd century CE asking rhetorically: Quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus [Who wonders at a swollen neck in the Alps]. Rolleston quotes a source in 1775 describing an incident involving an English traveller in the Tyrol of whom it was remarked that he would have been quite handsome if only he had had a goitre, such was the almost universal presence of goitre in that region (Rolleston 1936), presumably a long-standing feature. In Britain, we had our own, colloquial, ‘Derbyshire neck’.
Goitres did not escape artistic or literary attention, being painted by Leonardo Da Vinci (A Grotesque Head or Scaramuccia) (Vescia and Basso 1997), amongst others, and referred to by Shakespeare in The Tempest:
Faith, sir, you need not fear. When we were boys,
Who would believe that there were mountaineers
Dew-lapp’d like bulls, whose throats had hanging at ’
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