Joseph Boruwlaski died in his sleep on 5 December 1837 in the quiet English cathedral town of Durham. He had had a happy life, a rich life. Born into obscurity, he had achieved dizzying social heights. Famed for his conversation and his skill with the violin, he had known most of the crowned heads of Europe. Ennobled by the King of the Poles, he had also won the patronage of the Prince of Wales. He could call the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire his friends. He was an ornament of Durham; its council paid him merely to live there. He had married a noble beauty, raised a family and, when he died at the distinguished age of ninety-eight, had outlived nearly all his contemporaries. It was a graceful end to a remarkable life. For Joseph, le Comte de Boruwlaski, was not merely any Continental aristocrat exiled from his homeland. He was the last of the court dwarfs.
PERFECTION IN PROPORTION
Why was Boruwlaski so small? The delay in puberty points to a possible explanation. So do several portraits in oil, half a dozen engravings, and a full-sized bronze that stands even now in the foyer of Durham City Hall. They all show that le Comte was perfectly proportioned in his smallness. True, his proportions were not quite those of a full-sized adult; they are rather closer to those of a child of the same size. But there is no sign of bone disorders such as achondroplasia or pycnodysostosis that cause limbs to grow stubby or bent. It is a kind of smallness that speaks of a failure in one of the most powerful and far-reaching molecular devices that regulate the size we are.
At the base of our brains, in a cavity of the skull, lies a gland called the pituitary. As big as a pea, it is immensely powerful. The pituitary secretes six hormones that collectively regulate the development of breasts in pubescent girls and the secretion of milk in mothers; the production of sperm in men and the maturation of ova in women; our allergic responses and the way we cope with stress.
But much of the pituitary is devoted to making growth hormone: it makes about a thousand times more of this one molecule than any of the other five. Secreted into the bloodstream, growth hormone circulates throughout the body. Its message to the body’s cells is a simple one: ‘grow and divide’. Growth hormone is not, of course, the only molecule that can do this. Every organ has its own molecular devices for regulating its size and shape, but the ability of growth hormone to spread throughout the body from a single source means that it simultaneously affects the growth of all tissues. It is the multiplier of our flesh and bones.
Joseph Boruwlaski has all the signatures of growth-hormone failure: a body the size and proportions of a four-year-old’s, delayed puberty, and a briskly adult intellect. It is impossible to identify the molecular fault with any precision. A mutation in any one of half a dozen genes that control the regulation of growth hormone may have been responsible for Boruwlaski’s smallness. Alternatively, he may have had lots of growth hormone, but no receptor for it to bind to. In the foothills of the Ecuadorean Andes there is an entire community of more than fifty people who have mutated receptors; when fully grown, the men are only 124 centimetres (four feet) tall. They live in just two villages and are rather inbred. Although Catholic, many of them have Jewish names; they are thought to descend from conversos who came to the New World in flight from the Inquisition. It is likely that they brought the dwarfism mutation with them, since exactly the same mutation has also been found in a Moroccan Jew. The Ecuador dwarfs are bright; as children they have a knack for winning prizes at school. But as they get older they tire of being teased by schoolmates and tend to drop out, and in the most recent generation not one of the adults has married.
In 1782 Joseph Boruwlaski met his physical opposite.
Soon after my arrival in London, there appeared a stupendous giant; he was eight feet four inches high, was well proportioned, had a pleasing countenance, and what is not common in men of his size, his strength was adequate to his bulk. He was then two and twenty years of age; many persons wished to see us in company, particularly the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, my worthy protectress who, with Lady Spencer, proposed to see the giant.
I went and I believe we were equally astonished. The giant remained sometime mute. Then stooping very low he offered me his hand, which I am sure would have enclosed a dozen like mine. He paid me a genteel compliment and drew me near to him, that the difference of our size might strike the spectators the better: the top of my head scarce reached his knee.
Boruwlaski does not tell us the name of this man, but contemporary prints record the meeting of a dapperly dressed dwarf and a man called O’Brien who billed himself as ‘the Irish Giant’. This hardly clarifies matters, since there were at least four ‘Irish Giants’ circulating about Georgian London, two of whom called themselves O’Brien. Both O’Briens were born in Ireland around 1760 and claimed lineal descent from Brian Boru, an Irish monarch of mythically gigantic dimensions. Both came to London in the early 1780s; one exhibited himself in Piccadilly, the other in St James’s. Both claimed they were over eight feet tall, but neither was more than 235 centimetres (seven feet eight inches).
We know this because their skeletons have been measured. One of these men, Patrick Cotter, was buried in Bristol; his casket was found in 1906 and his skeleton examined before re-interment. The skeleton of the other, Charles Byrne, hangs in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. He is known there as Charlie, and he is an imposing sight, conveying an impression of oaken massivity. This is partly due to the brown tint of the bones, caused, it is said, by the speed and secrecy of their preparation. His jaw, chin and postorbital ridges are of a strength that must have given him a forbidding appearance in life. Towards his death, which was probably due to drink, he developed the morbid fear that anatomists would seize his bones. He was right to be worried, for a contemporary newspaper describes how ‘the whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor departed Irishman and surrounded his house, just as harpooners would an enormous whale’. In the event the anatomist and surgeon John Hunter got him, boiled him, and hung him where he can be seen today.
Charles Byrne had a pituitary tumor. In 1911 Sir Arthur Keith, Curator of the Hunterian, opened Charlie’s skull. The indentation that had once contained the pituitary was cavernous; the gland itself must have been more the size of a small tomato than a pea. Pituitary tumors secrete vast amounts of growth hormone. They cause the cells in the growth plates of a child’s limbs to divide abnormally fast, which in turn makes for super-charged growth. Childhood pituitary tumors are no less common now than when Irish giants stalked London’s West End, but these days they are quickly detected and surgically removed. In May 1941, when the Hunterian suffered a direct hit from German incendiary bombs, John Hunter’s giant fossil armadillo was destroyed, as were his stuffed crocodiles and many of the exquisite anatomical preparations to which he had devoted his life. Charlie, however, survived, so to speak.
PYGMIES
An old photograph shows a triptych of skeletons that used to stand in the public galleries of the Natural History Museum in London. The central skeleton once belonged to a European man. On his left stood the hunched skeleton of a lowland gorilla; on his right, the gracefully erect one of a pygmy woman. A label, barely discernible, credits the pygmy skeleton to Emin Pasha, African explorer and Ottoman administrator. His 1883 expedition diary records that it had been unusually expensive, an outbreak of cannibalism having inflated the price of human remains in Monbuttu-land. Yet he had paid the asking price without a murmur. Pygmy skeletons were highly desirable and every museum in Europe wanted one. It had only been thirteen years since an African pygmy had first stepped out of myth and into the modern world.