giants

giants Stories of men of great stature are found everywhere in legends and traditions of almost every culture in the history of mankind. The presence of these beings of extraordinary height, usually called giants, was traditionally associated with feelings of terror and impotence, their enormous size being closely related to the fear or wonder that they produced. In the West, we find early examples of such stories in the mythology of the classical world and in the Bible. The Titans, for instance, were described as beings of astounding stature and even greater strength who dared to rebel against the Olympian gods. The most clear representative of physical strength, however, has always been associated with the figure of Hercules, whose height was said to be about 7 feet. In the sacred texts, many other allusions can also be found to peoples and races of extraordinary height. The Nephilim were the first people to be referred to by the name of giants in the book of Genesis. Equally interesting, but perhaps more famous, are the cases of Og, king of Basham — whose story is related in the book of Joshua — and Goliath, in the second book of Samuel, who was said to have measured about 10 feet.

Legends like these, and many others, survived in both Eastern and Western traditions. They were compiled in medieval encyclopedias and books of wonders, and extended by the accounts provided by new chronicles or traveller's reports. Apart from being the subject of mythological legends and fairy tales, this phenomenon of inordinate bodily growth has been a clinical problem since the condition of ‘acromegaly’ was first described, and related to enlargement of the pituitary gland, in the nineteenth century. ‘Pituitary gigantism’ is now known to be caused by excessive secretion of growth hormone, starting before the length of the long bones is irrevocably fixed after adolescence. Abnormal growth elsewhere in the body, whether in such rare ‘giants’ or in those who (more commonly) develop the pituitary problem in their maturity, constitutes the condition of acromegaly. The symptoms of this illness are legion, including widespread abnormal growth of tissues and organs, with swelling of the lips and ears, pain in the joints, and impaired vision. As the scholar Helmut Bonheim has shown, many of these symptoms are also found in mythological figures and explain part of the lore of giants in myth and literature. For example, Polyphemus, the cyclops described by Homer, and who was depicted as being of extraordinary stature, could have gained his reputation of being one-eyed as a result of an abnormal growth of his pituitary gland, which, pressing on the optical nerves, may have diminished vision in both eyes or produced blindness in one of them. Bonheim also argues that perhaps the same condition of the giant's sight could have been advantageous to David in defeating Goliath, as some illustrations of this biblical scene seem to confirm. Many other features traditionally associated with giants, like their extraordinary appetite or their bodily deformities, may be explained in terms of the symptoms associated with acromegaly.

From a mere historical point of view, one of the first giants we have an account of was John Middleton, who lived at the end of the sixteenth century and reached a height of 9 feet 3 inches. As in many other similar cases, ‘the childe of Hale’ attracted so much notoriety that he was given audience by King James I. Indeed, from the sixteenth century onwards, many giants attracted the attention of kings and served as janitors, as porters, or as members of their private bodyguard. Specially famous was Oliver Cromwell's giant porter, named Daniel, whose height — of approximately 7 feet 6 inches — is marked by a big ‘O’ in the walls of Windsor Castle. Equally notorious was the army of giants that the king of Prussia, Federick I, stationed in Postdam at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and that became so famous throughout Europe that even the philosopher Voltaire occasionally made reference to it. One of the most celebrated cases of the eighteenth century was that of Charles Byrne, ‘the Irish giant’, who was 8 feet 4 inches tall, and whose skeleton ended up in the Royal College of Surgeons, very likely stolen by the famous anatomist and surgeon John Hunter. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Abbé Henrion, a member of the French Academy, taught that, as a consequence of original sin, there had been a progressive reduction of the height of men from the time of Adam until the arrival of Christ. Following his own calculations, Henrion stated that Adam had been 125 feet high, Eve 118, Noah 100, Abraham 28, Moses 13, Alexandre 6, and Julius Caesar 5. Though this idea never gained credibility among the scientific community, it remained quite popular within the Republic of Letters.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, unusually tall persons were exhibited for profit in circuses and freak shows. Given the social and physical barriers they had to encounter during their lives, many of these ‘giants’ were forced to make a career as human oddities. Specially notorious was the case of the American Robert Wadlow who, despite his height of 8 feet 11 inches, tried desperately until the moment of this death in 1940 to be considered neither a freak nor a medical case. He sued the American Medical Association for having cast him as a ‘preacromegalic giant’. Though he lost the case on technicalities, he may legitimately be credited with having been the last ‘giant’ of the twentieth century.

J. Moscoso

Bibliography

Bonheim, H. (1994). The giant in literature and in medical practice. Literature and Medicine, 13, 243–54.

See also growth hormone; pituitary gland.