History of Goiter

The first records of goiter and cretinism date back to ancient civilization, the Chinese and Hindu cultures and then to Greece and Rome.

Ancient Hindu accounts of medical literature likewise contain references to goiter from the period around 2000 BC. Tumors of the neck were known and treated surgically in ancient Egypt, according to the Eber papyrus – 1500 BC.

Galen wrote of the thyroid in the first centuries AD and the Roman satirist Juvenal observed ‘swollen neck’ around the same time in the Alps.

Ancient treatments for goiter included the administration of animal thyroids and iodine containing Sargasso weed.

Chinese physicians of the Tang dynasty (618-907) were the first to give the iodine rich thyroid glands from animals such as sheep and pigs in dried and powdered forms or mixed into wine to treat people with goiters.

The nineteenth century marked the beginning of serious attempts to control the problem, however, not until the latter half of the twentieth century was the necessary knowledge for effective prevention acquired.

At first there was the discovery of the significance of the functioning of the thyroid gland.

Between 1000 and 1100 AD, two Persian physicians, Avicenna and later Zayn al-Din-al-Jurani, first described the association of goiter and bulging of the eyes in the Cannon of Medicine.

Although ancient Chinese doctors prescribed seaweed to treat goiters, it was not until Bernard Courtois isolated iodine from seaweed in 1811 and Jean-François Coinder of Geneva hypothesized that he could use iodine to treat goiters in 1819.

Eugen Baumann (1846-1896) of Freiburg chemically analyzed the thyroid gland for the presence of iodine and found considerable quantities of it, which he called ‘thyreoidone’ in 1896, a crucial discovery providing the essential link in the pathogenetic chain.

Iodization of salt as a method of preventing goiter was first suggested by the French scientist Boussingault in 1831; however, mass prophylaxis was first attempted in Switzerland and Michigan (1922 to 1924).
History of Goiter