Copyright 2010
You are a mere 4 by 2
But have the power to keep our
50-100trillion cells warm and comfy
How do you do it?
What is your wisdom?
In our little earth
In the year 2011 of the rabbit
We only have around 7 billion
And about half of these
Suffer the poverty of food and shelter
In the heat of the winter
Many go cold
And 22,000 of our young ones
Die every day
How do you do what you do?
What is your wisdom?
How do you keep all happy and comfy
And how do you keep the home fires burning?
In the early days of man
We were ignorant of your simple need
Just a tincture of iodine was your request
Deficient in this dietary substance
Our mountain people
Suffered with “elephant of the throat”
And their children
With the terrible disease of the cretin
“Deaf and dumb and goiter hanging down to the waist”
Well a little of our wisdom started
Just before the first year of the Rat
In the year around 2700 BC
When the brilliant Emperor Shen Nung
Drank the first cup of tea,
Used the cannabis weed of the earth for gout,
And the weed from the sea to treat elephant throat
Later some said that you “hang like the scrotum”
And others said you were the size of a “jubube”
It took da Vinci and Vesalius to draw you,
Eustachian to name your isthmus
And finally Wharton to give you the name of
“Thyreoidea” – an oblong shield
Do you think he meant you Mother Shelter?
Or the solid cartilage lying just above you?
Matter not you are truly like mother shield who
Keeps the home fires burning
And everybody warm and comfy
Wang Hei said of the goiter that
Thyroid extract of 50 pigs mixed with cold wine
Would do the trick
Dusault -tried a partial extrication of the maladie
And Dupuytern was warned of your highly flammable vasculature
When he fiddled with your nakedness
While Reysch went beyond and deep
And found your follicles in the scope of a microlens
Then in France
Coutrois saw iodine in the weed of the sea
Prout recommended the violet chemical for the disease of mountain people
And then and then…
Kendall discovered your magic bullet and called it thyroxine
Now simply as T4
Three tons of animal thyroid yielded but 33gms of the drug
And in 1917 a mere cost of $350 per gram
And at about that time the Model T was selling for about $575
When a wage to make her was about $2.50 per day
So enter Sir Charles Harington of England
The factory line of T4 becomes real
And then enter Rosalind Pitt Rivers also from the Isles of Britain
With yet another magic bullet
This time triiodothyronine
Or simply Miss T3
So from whence is your wisdom and your magic
You produce a T3 and a T4
Now we know
Simple names for complex function
And we begin to learn that your wisdom reaches further
Hoskins unveils your “servo mechanism”
Humility in the presence of greater pituitary power
With angel messenger TSH
And you seek no beef
When your horses are held
When production is greater than needed
And you give great feedback
Not too much and not too little but just right, you always seem to say
And then we threw you another curved ball
Straight from the skies came
“Little Boy” to Hiroshima and
“Fat Man” to Nagasaki
And then another ball of fire
In the case of Chernobyl
These events shook the core of your nucleus
And in some cases you had no choice
Other than that of course
It is not always smooth sailing
When your fires burn too fast
You show the whites of their eyes
And their hands begin to shake
And all cells are on heat
Beware the rage of thyroid in the eye of the storm
When your fires burn too slow
They speak in low voice
And they always feel the cold and heavy
Beware the calm when the fires are almost out
Cold death from coma is scary
We stand in awe O oblong shield
The one that keeps the home fires burning
Using unique magic bullets
To keep 50-100 trillion cells
Churning at a comfortable pace
In the heart of winter and heat of the summer
Not too much nor too little, but just right you say
While remaining humble to the greater power…
This is your wisdom