On the transmission, from parent to offspring, of some forms of disease, and of morbid taints and tendencies / by James Whitehead.

  • Whitehead, James, 1812-1885.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: On the transmission, from parent to offspring, of some forms of disease, and of morbid taints and tendencies / by James Whitehead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    38/370 (page 24)
    24 HEREDITARY TRANSMISSION. while both died of apoplexy. * When diseases differ how¬ ever in the child from those prevalent in the parent or parents, they yet participate in the properties of those of their progenitors. Few diseases have received more attention than Scrofula, and yet, as regards its precise nature, the opinions of authors are far from being in unison. Two facts respecting it have, however, been clearly ascertained, namely, its hereditary continuation from parent to offspring to an extent not hitherto ascertained, and the altered state of the blood as demonstrated by analysis. Respecting the first-named proposition, most men, whe¬ ther medical or non-medical, are agreed ; and this conviction obtains most strongly among those who possess the taint, however unwilling they may be to admit the belief. It would be a work of supererogation to quote instances in illustration of this fact. It manifests itself in infancy and childhood, in form of ophthalmia, mesenteric disease, super¬ ficial affections of the lymphatic glands, impetigo, &c. ; in youth, under various forms of articular disease, glandular enlargements, obstinate skin affections, menstrual and other organic disturbances; in adult life, in form of phthisis, or that kind of cachexia popularly denominated decline, diseases of the bones and a multitude of others ; and, at a more ad¬ vanced period, in loss of vision, cerebral affections, tumors, dropsy, cancer, &c., and, in the female sex, in uterine hyper¬ trophy of a most intractable description, and extremely liable to malignant degeneration. That the blood is altered in its properties under these circumstances is a fact founded on experiment, and hence a most important deduction in a therapeutical point of view. In cases of scrofula, the blood, according to Dubois, who carefully analyzed it on several occasions, was found to ' Medical Journal, vol. xxi. p. 230.