OF BOILING OIL AND BARBERS' CHAIRS*

SHORTLY before his death, Sir Isaac Newton said, “I do not know what I may appear to this world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Goiter has been reported as existing since the beginning of the human race. It was first recorded in the East Indies two thousand years before Christ. It was not until 939 A.D., however, that the first attempt to cure goiter by surgery was made and recorded. Hippocrates is known to have considered goiter as a deformity of the body and in his Lib. de Glandulis he stated that, “Most diseases of the glands are not primary within themselves and when the glands of the neck become diseased of themselves, they become tubercular and produce struma and the body is attainted with fever. If it be the pituitous, and much in quantity and the fluxion is slow, then they become inflamed, and t...