Thirty-One Men With Female Sex Chromatin

DETERMINATION of the sex chromatin pattern is being more and more widely used in the examination of patients with various disturbances of somato- or psychosexual development. In 1956 this method of investigation showed that sex chromatin was of the feminine type in 18 cases of so-called Klinefelter's syndrome (1–5). Jirásek and Raboch (6) examined smears of the oral mucosa in 167 males with disturbances in genital development. The series included cases of hypospadias, bilateral aplasia of the ductus deferens, undescended testes, and sterility associated with absent or arrested spermatogenesis. In the course of that work, they found that the sex chromatin was usually of the female type only in patients with small testes (about 2 cm., long axis). For that reason they instituted a program of re-examining all men in whom, during the previous few years, small testes had been found by palpation, even though biopsy and other laboratory investigations had not been performed.