This is one of the more interesting bits of medical news that I’ve heard lately. Seems there is a young girl named Brooke Greenberg who has never aged. That is, she is now 12 years old, but she still looks and acts like a six-month old baby. She weighs only 13lbs and measures 27 inches.
Her condition has no name and doctors are unaware of any other child in her situation.
Brooke has learned to pull herself up in her cot, crawl across the floor and scoot along in a specially adapted baby-walker. She smiles at people she recognises, but has never been able to say a single word. She does finger paintings when presented with a pot of paint and sheet of paper.
She recognises her family, and giggles when tickled. She has no language skills but has a “sense of self” in that she suffers from healthy sibling rivalry.
[...] “There is no diagnosis. We don’t know what is going on,” said the family’s doctor, Lawrence Pakula, “There is no one else like her in the world.”
She’s suffered a variety of health problems throughout her life including this rather strange event:
At one point she was diagnosed with a brain tumour the size of a lemon, but it shrank away of its own accord, and Brooke simply woke up.
While her condition may be rare in the physical world, it’s got a name and a long history in the worlds of mythology and psychology. Jung called it the puer aeternus - the eternal youth.
[Found via a decent blog called Weird Events]
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5 Comments
I know it sounds crass, but I would love to see a photo.
My birthday falls on April 2nd. The day of the eternal child. Long before I ever knew that, I was labelled the peter pan of my family. The girl who refused to grow up. I swear there were years I didn’t grow at all from sheer will alone. I didn’t enter puberty until high school. Didn’t lose my last baby tooth until college. There’s a part in J.M Barrie’s play, that really shows the price of the eternal child’s gift:
PETER. You mustn’t touch me.
WENDY. Why?
PETER. No one must ever touch me.
WENDY. Why?
PETER. I don’t know.
(He is never touched by any one in the play.)
By remaining a child forever, Peter must remain separate and intangible from even the others in Neverland. There’s always a limit to his inteaction, and a complete lack of intimacy.
Later, he states “To die will be an awfully big adventure” but the stage direction of (with a drum beating in his breast as if he were a real boy at last) seems to suggest that he’s longing for the adventure of actually living…
That has to be a fake report! It took twelve years for us to hear about this? No way!
Well, oh snap, here’s a link with the original TV news broadcast with the doctor saying it’s real.
http://xo.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/update_12yo_gir.html
And this is circling the Internets very quickly. The news channel already responded that it’s not a hoax.
Spork- Funny you should mention that, I’ve just come back (literally) from having a stubborn ‘baby tooth’ excised. (I’m thirty three)