The man recently
exhibited under the title of the "Elastic-Skin Man" was an
example of this anomaly. The first of this class of
exhibitionists was seen in Buda-Pesth some years since and
possessed great elasticity in the skin of his whole body; even
his nose could be stretched. Figure 70 represents a photograph of
an exhibitionist named Felix Wehrle, who besides having the power
to stretch his skin could readily bend his fingers backward and
forward. The photograph was taken in January, 1888.
In these congenital cases there is loose attachment of the skin
without hypertrophy, to which the term dermatolysis is restricted
by Crocker. Job van Meekren, the celebrated Dutch physician of
the seventeenth century, states that in 1657 a Spaniard, Georgius
Albes, is reported to have been able to draw the skin of the left
pectoral region to the left ear, or the skin under the face over
the chin to the vertex. The skin over the knee could be extended
half a yard, and when it retracted to its normal position it was
not in folds. Seiffert examined a case of this nature in a young
man of nineteen, and, contrary to Kopp's supposition, found that
in some skin from over the left second rib the elastic fibers
were quite normal, but there was transformation of the connective
tissue of the dermis into an unformed tissue like a myxoma, with
total disappearance of the connective-tissue bundles.
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