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Mentally and emotionally, Robert Wadlow seems to be a normal 19-year-old smalltown boy. He was a star basketball player at Alton High School. He swims well. He does not go boating because the only time he entered a rowboat he foundered it, almost drowning his father and himself. Nor can he join in social sports like tennis. He is too big to go out with girls, so he entertains himself with photography. He likes to have his little sister and brother clamber over him. He helps his mother around the house with such tall chores ar washing windows and wiping ceilings clean of dust. Ceilings in the Wadlow home are only a fraction of an inch above the boy's blond head. His bed measures nine feet. For breakfast he eats a dozen eggs.
Robert is now a freshman at Shurtleff College in Alton. He hopes to become a lawyer and escape the curiosity of normal size people. Frequently he exclaims: "It's not my fault that I'm this way. ... I didn't have anything to do with my getting this way."
Cause of his condition is hypertrophy of his pituitary gland. This endocrine body, situated under the brain, controls growth. Usually when it goes awry it affects the individual either at puberty or after he reaches maturity. Adolescent pituitary trouble makes the victim exceedingly tall and lanky. Later it makes the hands, feet and head (especially the chin) vast and ponderous. Robert Wadlow's condition started at birth. Hence his 8 ft. 6 in. and his 435 Ib. are in fairly good proportion.
Many doctors have tried to measure this giant for medical records. He resents them. Nonetheless last June he let Dr. Charles Dean Humberd measure him for the recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Humberd is the coroner of Nodaway County in northwest Missouri and the only doctor in the village of Barnard, where he was born. In Barnard lived a minor politician who weighed 427 lb. when he died last year, and a 19-year-old boy who was 7 ft. tall when he went to a CCC camp last season. Those divergents from the norms of humanity started Dr. Humberd, 40, a curly-headed bookworm, on a study of gigantism. He has hats, shoes, rings and other souvenirs of most of the circus giants of the U. S. (see p. 45), but nothing so meticulous as his record cf Robert Wadlow, which he obtained only after "a lavish and continued expenditure of much cajolery, flattery, servility, wheedling and exaggerated politeness and persistence."
The Alton Giant, reports Dr. Humberd, has good posture for his size and weight, but droops when he sits. The boy's voice "is a weak bass, thick, husky, mumbling and comparable to the enunciation of a patient with an acute quinsy."
The boy's nose is 2 in. wide. His hands are a foot long. His fingers are double jointed and, comments Dr. Humberd, "curl themselves up in bizarre positions and assume ungainly and gruesome postures." His feet "are disproportionally large and he is very flatfooted. His toes are misshapen."
All giants have trouble with their feet. Robert Wadlow has no sensations of touch, pain or temperature in his feet. Says Dr. Humberd: "He is unaware of a wrinkle in his sock or a foreign body in his shoe until a blister, followed by an ulcer, is formed." His ears are oversize, his heart in proper proportion, genitalia small but normal.