In addition there were neither eyebrows nor eyelashes and nowhere
a trace of lanugo. The children were otherwise healthy and well
formed. The parents and brothers were healthy and possessed a
full growth of hair. Thurman reports a case of a man of
fifty-eight, who was almost devoid of hair all his life and
possessed only four teeth. His skin was very delicate and there
was absence of sensible perspiration and tears. The skin was
peculiar in thinness, softness, and absence of pigmentation. The
hair on the crown of the head and back was very fine, short, and
soft, and not more in quantity than that of an infant of three
months. There was a similar peculiarity in his cousin-german.
Williams mentions the case of a young lady of fifteen with
scarcely any hair on the eyebrows or head and no eyelashes. She
was edentulous and had never sensibly perspired. She improved
under tonic treatment.
Rayer quotes the case of Beauvais, who was a patient in the
Hopital de la Charite in 1827. The skin of this man's cranium was
apparently completely naked, although in examining it narrowly it
was found to be beset with a quantity of very white and silky
hair, similar to the down that covers the scalp of infants; here
and there on the temples there were a few black specks,
occasioned by the stumps of several hairs which the patient had
shaved off.
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