Growing Fevers

When Dr. Haven Emerson of Manhattan was a young man, before the Spanish-American War, grandams wisely declared that children grew taller in the springtime, with the plants.

When, after that war, he followed the career of his father, Dr. John Haven Emerson, he observed that children did grow taller in the springtime. They also took sick with colds, fevers, measles, scarlatina, scarlet fever, chicken-pox—in the springtime.

Latterly, after the World War, when he had established himself as professor of public health administration at Columbia University and as associate editor of the Nation’s Health and of the Survey, he made a study of child growth, in localities as scattered as Manhattan, Toronto and Honolulu. He found that under favorable conditions children grew without relation to the seasons of the year; he decided that children who grew lanky & gawky in the spring, grew lanky & gawky because they had fevers.

The theory held by doctors is that infectious diseases, caught usually in the springtime, affect the pituitary gland. This is an endocrine gland the size of a big pea, located underneath the cerebrum and on about a line with the bridge of the nose. Formerly medicos supposed that it secreted the mucus of the nose. (In Latin pituita means phlegm.) Actually it controls the growth of the bones of body—those of the arms and legs. When it is pathologically oversize, it makes giants of the diseased persons; when undersize it dwarfs them. Irritated temporarily by springtime disease, it, in good theory, makes the sick child grow like a weed.