History
Perhaps the most famous person who exemplified the appearance of untreated congenital growth hormone deficiency was Charles Sherwood Stratton (1838–1883), who was exhibited by P.T. Barnum as General Tom Thumb, and married Lavinia Warren. Pictures of the couple show the typical adult features of untreated severe growth hormone deficiency. Despite the severe shortness, limbs and trunks are proportional.
Like many other nineteenth-century medical terms that lost precise meaning as they gained wider currency, “midget,” as a term for someone with extreme proportional shortness, acquired pejorative connotations and is no longer used in medical contexts.
By the middle of the twentieth century, endocrinologists understood the clinical features of growth hormone deficiency. GH is a protein hormone, like insulin, which had been purified from pig and cow pancreases for treatment of type 1 diabetes since the 1920s. However, pig and cow GH did not work at all in humans, due to greater species-to-species variation of molecular structure (i.e., insulin is considered more "evolutionarily conserved" than GH).
Read more about this topic: Growth Hormone Treatment
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