The hair : its growth, care, diseases, and treatment / by C. Henri Leonard.

  • Leonard, C. Henri (Charles Henri), 1850-1925
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hair : its growth, care, diseases, and treatment / by C. Henri Leonard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    haps; he has it cut every month, when some two inches of its length is removed each time. He has always enjoyed good health till within a year, when, through the protracted sickness, and finally death, of his wife, he became very much reduced, and has never seemed to have regained his former health. There has been nothing extraordinary in his mode of living, his diet being that of the ordinary farmer. Undoubt- edly the continual draft upon his economy, that his luxuriant hair-growth is making, is a prime factor in keeping him in ill health. The earliest record that we have of excessive hair growth is found in one of the Hippocratic treatises [about 500 years B. C], where Phsetusa, of the Thracian city, Abdera, and wife of Pytheus, awoke one morning with a loss of her beautiful voice, and with pains in her joints, and a heavy growth of hair starting from her chin. Apropos of the case of Mr. Smith, Eble informs us that, in the Prince's Court of Eidam, there is a life-size portrait of a carpenter represented, whose beard was nine feet in length; he carried it in a bag when at his work. Mr. Smith, by the way, has his braided in long narrow strands, and these rolled up into a ball, one over the other, and then tied, hanging beneath the chin; the shorter hairs, therefore, cover it up, so any one would not suspect the enormous beard-growth that he carries with him. Then we have the case of the burgemeister, Hans Steiningen, whose beard was so long that, when ascending the steps to the Council Chamber, one day, he stepped upon it, and so fell and was killed. An Amazon was taken in the battle of Pultowa, who was the possessor of a beard that measured four and one-half feet in length.