Medicine: Adolescence

The first conference ever held on the problems of adolescence, conducted at Cleveland last week by the Brush Foundation and Western Reserve University, served to show how little is known about the profound physical and mental changes which occur as children turn into adults.

Time after time the two dozen speakers were obliged to qualify their statements with “it seems,” “perhaps,” “so far as is known.” Although the harvest was meagre, it supplied ample seeds for further cultivating. Some seeds:

¶ “Adolescence is a misnomer. There is no phase of development which delimits the state of adolescence unless it be the sudden supervention of those phenomena associated with the blossoming of the sex function. But this occurs over a wide range of years. . . . Man is the only mammal with a prolonged period of development which may roughly be called the age of adolescence.” At birth a rat has a physiological age equivalent to a nine-year-old child. “The elephant, in spite of its huge bulk, seems to pass through the successive phases of development to adulthood at approximately the same chronological rate as man.” Anthropoids and Man keep time for six years. Then suddenly the anthropoids spurt. A seven-year ape equals a 12½-year boy; an eight-year ape a 20-year boy.—Dr.Thomas Wingate Todd, Cleveland.

¶Girls of 12 and boys of 14½ grow suddenly. The growth accompanies development of secondary sex characters. Girls and boys grow at the same rate until the eleventh year. Then girls grow faster than boys. At 15 boys begin to grow faster and soon overtake the girls.—Dr. Charles Benedict Davenport, Cold Spring Harbor, L.I.

¶In late infancy and in childhood the face as a whole grows at its highest rate of speed.” It grows more from lips to ears than from forehead to chin or cheek to cheek. In girls the face deepens from lips to ears until the ninth year. Then until the 15th year it spreads.—Dr. Milo Hellman, Manhattan.