#goitres

Humans treating parts of their bodies as excrescences immediately attracted his attention in real life as well as in the novels. When traveling in Switzerland he noticed that the women who sat by the roadside suckling their children had "such enormous goiters" (or glandular swellings in the throat) that it became a science to know where the nurse ended and the child began." When a woman was summoned she would approach hastily, "throwing a child over one of her shoulders and her goiter over the other."

Derbyshire neck