Pachycephaly

The terms macro- and microcephalic are, in any case, quite generic, and simply indicate a morphological anomaly, which may include many widely different cases, such, for example, as rickets, hydrocephaly, pachycephaly, etc., all of which have in common the morphological characteristic of macrocephaly.

Like Chaucer's Miller, David Ritchie, the original of Scott's Black Dwarf, was an example of pachycephaly; i.e., he had the ability to run through doors with his hard skull.

The Miller breaks doors with his head (lines 550-51). This claim is feasible, for several nineteenth- and twentieth-century men are know to have performed similar feats. Thus 'we may be sure that between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries stretched a long, thick-set line of heroes whose pachycephaly was exploited to stir the wonder and respect of their less gifted fellows' (p 419).