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Growth treatment for human growth failure when its cause is not identified is generally justified by two possible outcome measures: an increase in height and an increase in psychological well-being. An endocrinological cosmetic increase in height can arguably only be justified if it can be demonstrated as being likely to increase psychological well-being. New evidence is pointing to improved growth and mental health outcomes through psychotherapeutic family intervention during the child’s infancy. The medical definition of short stature (SS) is arbitrary (Cowell 1995): SS is usually defined for the height of an individual who is in less than the 3rd percentile of the reference range, which is 1.88 standard deviations (SDs) below the population mean (National Center for Health Statistics 1977; WHO 1986, 2006). Short stature may be caused by a multitude of factors, sometimes overlapping, and it may have many potential classifications. The condition of maturational delay occurs when significant SS and delayed pubertal development are seen in an otherwise healthy male (Cowell 1995; Cowell, Craig, and Ambler 1999; Cowell and Walker 1996). The medical diagnosis of maturational delay short stature (MDSS) is (a) considered in individuals with a late onset of puberty in which there is a family history of delayed puberty and an absence of organic symptoms or signs; and (b) diagnostic differentiation is made between MDSS and idiopathic short stature (ISS), with the latter encompassing MDSS but failing to meet the criteria of delayed puberty. When a history of SS is present in family members, the diagnosis of familial SS (FSS) is considered. Males present for treatment of SS much more frequently than females, which is a reflection of biology and possible societal bias, and some will present with behavioral disturbances. Multifactorial causes for these behavior problems can be embedded in past history and are not always easily accessible (Seegal 2000). Home environment problems may be present in growth failure, especially when demonstrated behavior problems are present (Gohlke et al. 1998; Nieves-Rivers et al. 1998).

Gives perspective to the debate over living standards during industrialization by examining health and nutrition over the past 1200 years using stature either recorded on military records or inferred from skeletal remains. From an average of 173.4 cm in the early Middle Ages, the heights of men fell approximately 6.4 cm, reaching a minimum sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and recovery to levels of a millennium earlier was not attained until the 1920s. The decline that began in the late Middle Ages may be linked with a cooler and more variable climate; growing inequality; urbanization; fluctuations in population size that impinged on nutritional status; the global spread of diseases associated with European expansion and colonization; and wars over state building or religion. The upturn well underway by the nineteenth century was associated initially with dietary improvements and later with reduced exposure to disease related to public health measures and better housing.

Traditional measures of real wages cover only the standard of living of a small fraction of the Danish population in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and due to constant wages over long periods the measures reflect primarily price changes. Mortality statistics can also be used to measure changes in the standard of living—both in the short and the long run until about 1840. Human stature of the Danish population shows relatively constant average heights from 1789 to the 1850s.

This chapter examines the development of the joint stock company and the first statute on companies. The framework of the joint stock company was only obtainable by specific statute or royal charter and was a cumbersome and expensive process, best suited to major projects. The first Act introduced was the Joint Stock Company Regulation and Registration Act 1844. Its scope is narrow in that it does not confer limited liability on shareholders; Parliament felt that this would open the floodgates to unscrupulous promoters who would gather in public subscriptions, run off with them, and leave the poor unfortunate creditors to pursue the shareholders to repay the company's outstanding debts. The way to make shareholders resist such promotions was to leave them with this liability. The shareholders would have a direct incentive to monitor the company's solvency and therefore its progress.

Special psychological barriers to career exit that business heroes face are suggested in this chapter. These include the feared loss of heroic stature and loss of the sense of heroic mission. This chapter also presents how these barriers can be lessened or heightened depending on the environment of the heroes' firms. The chapter also introduces four types of departure styles of retiring business leaders, namely: monarchs, generals, ambassadors, and governors, as well as a variety of methods used to overcome the barriers to retirement. Also included in this chapter are key findings from a chief executive survey and an analysis of compustat data.

Generals also depart in a style marked by forcible exit. Here, the chief executive leaves office reluctantly, but plots his return and quickly comes back to office out of retirement in order to rescue the company from the real or imagined inadequacy of his or her successor. The general enjoys being the returning savior and often hopes to remain around long enough to take the firm and himself towards even greater glory. In this chapter, three well-known military generals—Douglas MacArthur, George S. Pattern, and Charles de Gaulle—will serve as models for the corporate general. The leaders reviewed in this chapter are considered as generals because, like the three military generals discussed, they came to rely upon the corporate battlefield for their primary adult identity. This chapter also illustrates how their need for successful heroic mission is not as motivating as their need to retain their heroic stature.

This chapter reviews the study of stature in the archaeological record with a focus on the Roman period. A critical review of current methods of estimating stature, including an evaluation of the differing techniques and their application to the Roman period follows. This chapter does not advocate the comparison of long bone lengths alone for the study of stature in the Roman world. It argues that such an approach overlooks the biocultural significance of overall body proportions (including trunk height); instead more effort should be made to establish population-specific regression formulae. Finally, the chapter argues that because adult stature and final body proportions are strongly influenced by environmental conditions during childhood, a more nuanced consideration of growth and adversity during infancy and childhood is required.

Relatively little is known about the lives of the poor in Ireland during the nineteenth century. Bioarchaeological analysis of skeletal remains from the Kilkenny Union Workhouse mass burials indicate that they are of average stature compared to contemporaneous skeletal populations in Ireland, Britain, and North America. The paleopathological analysis reveals that many suffered from dental disease and joint pain, and trauma frequencies appear slightly higher compared to other nineteenth-century population groups. A high frequency of clay-pipe facets in both adult male and female dentitions reveals that many were smokers, and this may be a reflection of their social class.

Assessment of a child with short stature is one of the commonest endocrinology cases seen in the exam. It is important to remember that short stature is not a disease by itself and is an impairment of linear growth. The term ‘short stature’ is restricted to height-related issues above 2 years of age, in contrast to ‘faltering growth’ which focuses on weight-related issues in those less than 2 years. Short stature is a height which is less than the third percentile for age on the growth chart derived from local data. Other definitions of impaired linear growth are height significantly below genetic potentials (−2 standard deviations below midparental height), abnormally slow growth velocity, and downwardly crossing percentile channels in a child older than 18 months. To determine the normalcy of stature, one needs a relevant history and serial height measurements over time documented on a growth chart. In the exam, the examiner may provide the context of the case and the child’s growth chart. In the United Kingdom, the most widely used charts include the one published by the Child Growth Foundation 1996/1, and the UK–WHO growth charts published by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health using the World Health Organization standards (figure 13.1). Be familiar with the use of the different charts and remember to use growth charts appropriate for sex and underlying disease (Down’s syndrome, Turner’s syndrome). The causes of short stature are given in table 13.1 and features of common conditions causing short stature in table 13.2. Possible conditions seen in a child with short stature commonly encountered in the MRCPCH Clinical Exam are listed in table 13.3. You may be asked to assess the child’s growth or assess the child with short stature. Such an assessment is appropriate only after taking into account the history and physical examination findings. However, in the clinical exam, you will not be allowed to take a history and have to evaluate the child based on the clues available at the bedside and examination findings.

This chapter examines the relationship between industrialization and health, focusing on recent progress in the field made by scholars in comparative studies of eight countries: the UK, US, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. While using traditional measures, such as per capita Gross National Product and life expectancy, the chapter also employs a newly forged data source: anthropometric measures, particularly human stature gathered from military records. Height data provide important insights intro nutritional status and health during childhood and adolescence. A combination of general tendencies and idiosycratic factors affected health during the industrial revolutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Urbanization was a major contributor to ill-health within countries studied in Europe, in the Pacific, and within the US. Height was inversely correlated with degree or urbanization across countries, and rising urbanization led to health deterioration, especially in England, Australia, and Japan.

This chapter argues that constitutional stature is potentially a factor in every rights dispute because real people with concrete, personal interests assert constitutional rights claims. Two types of arguments about constitutional stature are commonly made. A party may remind justices that she is presumptively equal to other citizens in all respects relevant to citizenship and is therefore entitled to the same rights other citizens have traditionally enjoyed. In the alternative, a party may argue that a presumption of full constitutional stature requires affirmation of a previously unrecognized right. A solid understanding of just what a person accorded full constitutional stature looks like is also needed given the fact that constitutional stature is such an important issue in rights disputing. The chapter outlines three perspectives that together form a picture of such a person. One perspective draws on liberal philosophy, a second on a trust metaphor, and a third on a concept of constitutional leadership.

In rights disputes, justices who call a loser's constitutional stature into question inflict significant harm. This chapter argues that we would be well advised to think more deeply about the reasonable equality and consent expectations linked to constitutional stature. If we fully understand the traits and capabilities with which each of us, as a citizen, is presumptively endowed, we will be able to articulate reasons for the special outrage we sometimes experience as a constitutional loser. Only then will we be prepared to offer practical suggestions for ensuring that judicial opinions do not inflict double losses on losing stakeholders.

This chapter offers examples of rights decisions in which justices' harmful assertions about the losers' constitutional stature were so intertwined with the analysis of the merits of the dispute that the legitimacy of the decision is in doubt. These include the 1986 decision, Bowers v. Hardwick, and the more recent 2007 Roberts Court decision, Gonzales v. Carhart.

Blatant attacks on constitutional stature such as those in Bowers and Carhart are relatively few and far between. But although justices more often than not manage to explain their decisions without directly challenging the losers' constitutional stature, they nonetheless find ways to call constitutional stature into question more subtly and indirectly. This chapter explores how judicial untruthfulness about what is at stake for constitutional losers puts constitutional stature at risk.

Honoring constitutional stature and ameliorating harms inherent in losing a rights dispute requires more from justices than a mere refusal to attack constitutional stature. Honoring constitutional stature requires affirmative acts. The previous chapter argued that justices might consider writing opinions containing the elements of a valid apology if they wish to honor losers' constitutional stature and ameliorate the harms done to them. This chapter sets forth four specific recommendations compatible with that argument. The first recommendation is that justices abandon the convention of relying on dissenting opinions to explain fully losers' interests and values. A second recommendation is that justices must accept responsibility for inflicting harm on constitutional losers. A third recommendation, which is closely related to the second, is that justices should convey humility in their opinions. Finally, opinions capable of restoring a proper relationship between justices and constitutional losers who suffer harm must be written with an understanding that language has the power not only to persuade but also to cause harm. Thus, justices should not only use words precisely and with an understanding of their nuances; they should also know how to speak in a manner suited to their relationship with and obligations to citizen stakeholders in rights disputes.

When people discuss what Supreme Court justices should do when asked to resolve passionately contested rights disputes, the topic of abortion inevitably surfaces. This chapter explores failures to satisfy harm-amelioration and harm-avoidance obligations in two well-known abortion rights decisions: Roe v. Wade and Gonzales v. Carhart. It argues that honoring rather than attacking the constitutional stature of all parties is perhaps the best way that justices can ensure that the Constitution has meaning for “people of fundamentally different views.” It will require justices, however, to be willing to take some risks in their opinions.

Harm-amelioration practices clearly keep the courthouse door open for constitutional losers to redeem constitutional meaning in different times and contexts and make it difficult for us to deny the “never-say-never” features of rights adjudication. Never-say-never terrain may seem dangerous to some, for it arguably gives us insufficiently authoritative statements of constitutional meaning, is susceptible to arbitrary judicial action, and puts judicial legitimacy on shaky ground. In particular, some may be concerned that it threatens our system of precedent, in which prior decisions are seen as final resolutions of rights disputes that control what justices do in subsequent controversies. These fears are illusory. Nothing in harm-amelioration practices compromises either precedent, which is central to our system of judicial review, or appropriate finality in Supreme Court decisions. This chapter shows that harm-amelioration practices only help us learn to value precedent and finality differently. Moreover, there are very good reasons to welcome the types of contingencies and opportunities for enhancing judicial legitimacy that result from harm-amelioration practices. Such practices can help us ground judicial legitimacy in new understandings of the inherently democratic character of the Supreme Court.

The indifference of justices, both to the harm they inflict on constitutional stature and to the opportunities they have to enhance their legitimacy by honoring stature, can run deep. This chapter analyzes troubling features of Chief Justice Roberts's plurality opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1 and the majority opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Parents Involved plurality opinion repeats previously discussed failures to satisfy the harm-avoidance obligation which are evident in earlier decisions such as Bowers v. Hardwick. The plurality opinion also reveals an indifference to harm-amelioration obligations. The adamant refusal in Citizens United to acknowledge important differences between corporations and citizens is disquieting confirmation of previous arguments that some justices may not highly value the constitutional stature of citizens.

The story and character of Claudius immediately appealed. An aging cripple who became emperor by outwitting his contemptuous family and subjects was a character of Shakespearean stature, and his near destruction by his nymphomaniac child-wife Messalina gave the story added spice. But von Sternberg had a larger vision. His plan was not only to bring to life an old empire, but to hold it up as a mirror to our own tottering values, and to investigate the diseased roots of excessive ambition. Von Sternberg may have been thinking of his own “excessive ambition.” In the latter case, the film offered rich material for his favorite pastime: getting his own back.