Polite Dissent

Thanks to the Comic Queen, the Comics Reporter and Thought Balloons for steering me in the direction of this interesting newspaper article from Canada.

As a joke, a group of Canadian medical school professors tackle the medical problems of a fictional character on an annual basis. This year, they’re turning their eyes on the ever-youthful reporter Tintin.

It appears that his perennially prepubescent look is due to a growth-hormone deficiency and hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, conditions likely brought on by repeated blows to the head.

“We believe that the multiple traumas Tintin sustained could be the first case of traumatic pituitary injury described in the literature,” said Claude Cyr, an associate professor of medicine at the Université de Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Que.

His lighthearted research is published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s annual holiday edition, which has a tradition of diagnosing fictional characters with real medical conditions.

Essentially, the Canadian physicians are saying that repeated blows to the head have damaged Tintin’s pituitary gland. This gland is located on the underside of the brain and controls the body’s hormones. Without the pituitary functioning properly, he would be low on growth hormone and low on male hormones. This would lead to the previously mentioned hypogonadism. That means…well, let’s just say that Tintin would have an underdeveloped male anatomy and a lack of secondary sexual characteristics such as facial hair, broad shoulders, a deep voice, and so on.

How blows to the top and back of the head would affect the base of his brain is never explained. I think it would be more reasonable to assume that he always had the low hormones rather then developed them later. But that explanation wouldn’t be as much fun, so I’ll just agree with the Canadian doctors. I wonder what they’d make of Hal Jordan?