An account of two remarkable Indian dwarfs exhibited in Boston under the name of Aztec children / by J. Mason Warren, M.D.

  • Jonathan Mason Warren
Date:
[1851]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An account of two remarkable Indian dwarfs exhibited in Boston under the name of Aztec children / by J. Mason Warren, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF THE MEDICAL SCIENCES FOE APRIL 1851. Art. I.—An Account of two remarkable Indian Dwarfs exhibited in Boston under the name of Aztec Children. By J. Mason Warren, M. D. [With two plates.] • Two children have appeared in Boston so remarkable for their smallness of stature and the peculiarities of their mental faculties, that they seem to merit some public notice. I propose to state, in the following paper, simple matters of fact, without attempting any speculations in regard to them. The children are a boy and girl, and from the appearance offered by their dentition, hereafter to be given, the former is from seven to eight years of age, the latter from four to six; allowance being made for a retarded condition of these organs, on account of the otherwise abnormal want of development of the whole body. The boy is thirty-three and three-quarters inches in height, and his weight twenty and three-eighths pounds. The girl is twenty-nine and a half inches high, and her weight seventeen pounds. Their skin is of a dark yellowish cast, lighter than what is generally attributed to the Indian in this part of the country, and somewhat darker than that of the mulatto. The hair at the middle parting rises at an inch distant from the root of the nose, but on each side a fine hair descends quite to the edge of the orbit. In the boy, it is black, coarse, and quite stiff—in the girl, wavy and curled. The eyes are large and lustrous. The nose of the boy is quite prominent, and as seen in profile somewhat arched, but seen in front it is a little flattened at the apex; the nostrils are expanded, this feature being less marked in the girl than in the boy. The line of the nostril is oblique, instead of being longitudinal as in the Caucasian race. The separation of the cartilages at the apex is not easily distinguished. The supra-orbitar ridges are very prominent, the head No. XLII.— April, 1851. 20