Excerpt from The Disorders of Post-Natal Growth and Development Nearly twenty years ago a little shrivelled boy-man was brought into my consulting-room. It was obvious at a glance that his complaint was not of any ordinary kind. He was, indeed, a most extraordinary object; but although he was afterwards often examined with the view of finding out the nature of his disease, I could not arrive at any satisfactory conclusion. Clearly the malady was not cretinism, nor rickets, nor syphilis, nor acromegaly. But what was it? His portrait was shown to many medical friends and acquaintances, but not one had ever seen anything like him, until one day I had the good fortune to show a copy to Sir Jonathan Hutchinson. With his marvellous clinical insight he at once pointed the way to the elucidation of the mystery. Moreover, he had once seen a similar case. On referring to his description of this patient I found that while mine was of the age of sixteen years, Sir Jonathan Hutchinson's had been only two and a half years old when brought to his notice some twelve years before. It subsequently turned out that the two cases were almost identical, yet great and striking changes had taken place while the child was developing, and even now, after an intimate study of these two patients, it is a matter for wonder that Sir Jonathan should so readily have seen the connection between the child that was brought to him with cutaneous atrophy and the emaciated old man of sixteen. I was not only furnished with the clue to the nature of the disease, but received most kind permission to seek out this old patient and make notes of his condition. Subsequently it became clear that the disease was premature old age, engrafted upon, or running side by side with, a condition of immaturity or infantilism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.