BobHarris.com - Repeated blows to the head: the secret to eternal youth

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Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

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— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

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— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review

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Repeated blows to the head: the secret to eternal youth

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Thursday, 09 December 2004

The Christmas edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, which has a history of running delightfully loopy analyses this time of year, claims to have solved the secret to how comic book hero Tintin has spent 50 years in the public eye while suffering no signs of aging: repeated blows to the head.

We describe the unique case of a public figure who is well known for having delayed pubertal development and statural growth (Fig. 1). We believe we have discovered why Tintin, the young reporter whose stories were published between 1929 and 1975, never grew taller and never needed to shave.

We do not know Tintin's perinatal history. According to Hergé, the author of these stories, Tintin was 14 or 15 years old when he was created. He would, therefore, have been at least 60 years old during his final adventure with the Picaros. In that book, even though he had reached adulthood, Tintin has no beard or grey hair, and he exhibits no signs of pubertal development.

Recent literature has helped us gain a better understanding of the pathophysiology of hypopituitarism resulting from repeated head trauma. We believe that the multiple traumas Tintin sustained could be the first case of traumatic pituitary injury described in the literature.

In previous years, the same good doctors celebrated Christmas by declaring the Winnie The Pooh's search for honey was obsessive compulsive disorder and that Squirrel Nutkin was autistic.

Doctors with a sense of humor? WTF. Score another one for the Canadian health care system...