Marfan results in a wide range of eye problems, heart ailments, and skeletal deformities - along with extreme tallness.

I was reminded of this encounter recently while listening to an interview on WHYY-FM (90.9) with Arianne Cohen about her book, The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life From on High.

The case I saw in the clinic was medically intriguing because Marfan syndrome is so rare. I had read about it only in textbooks. But something else was equally striking: the patient's height. This boy was only 5 years old, yet we were all talking to him as if he were 10 because he was so tall. I wondered: How would this extreme height affect his life?

That's where the book by Cohen, who spent time in the Philadelphia area as a competitive swimmer at Germantown Academy, takes off. At 6-foot-3, she found that her height was always part of her identity. Her memoir allows others to understand the tall experience by combining her experiences growing up tall with serious research, Guinness Book of World Records-like factoids, and celebrity anecdotes.

I came to this as a woman with above-average height in the United States - 5-7 - but not dramatically so. I never felt a stigma from that.

But being tall can be hard, especially for young girls. Cohen endured frequent taunts from bullies like: "Hey, Amazon Ari." Her mother, also quite tall, had to console her: "It's what's on the inside that matters."

Being tall means people assume you are older than you are, as I incorrectly did with our patient. Cohen began babysitting at 9, which, she says, she never would have been able to pull off had she looked her age.

Tall people dominate the workplace, too. This may be because tall people rock job interviews. "As a rule of thumb," Cohen writes, "70 percent of employers choose the taller applicant." Then, because coworkers perceive tallness as authority, tall people climb the ladder to make up a significant number of chief executive officers.

It happens in politics, too. Think presidential: In the last 31 elections, the taller candidate clinched the job 26 times, Cohen says. The average height of our presidents has been 6-1 in the last 50 years; that's the 88th percentile for men.

With all of these benefits to tallness, it's a wonder that tallness is linked to disease. Perhaps, Cohen argues, that's because of the death of the best-known giant in history, Robert Pershing Wadlow, who grew to 8-11. He was on the circus tour in the late 1930s and then died in 1940 at 22 from an infected foot blister. His death was a newspaper sensation.

Cohen told me that "99.9 percent of tall people do not have illness." Some of the longest-living animals - whales and elephants, for example - are pretty tall, too.

"I have been asked my entire life whether I have a disease. But the funny thing is, tall people look healthy. Look at me: I am this strapping, healthy girl. The assumption should be that I'm just a tall person."

Cohen did get tested for Marfan when she was a little girl because a grandfather had died early of heart problems and she was a competitive athlete. She turned out not to have it.

Our patient, then, is surely the exception in the tall kingdom. He does have a syndrome. But luckily glasses will suffice for now to treat his dislocated lenses. There's no immediate need for surgery. And he is being watched for heart problems.

I know he will endure some of the challenges that Cohen faced as a supersize human being. But there should also be some pretty neat benefits.