54 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



will give a tithe of the attention to the laws of heredi- 

 tary transmission in the production of his children that 

 he does in the production of every other animal over 

 which he has control, this vis medicatrix naturae will 

 assist him, and he may hope soon to have the human 

 family as free from hereditary disease and imperfec- 

 tion as are the animals in Nature. If man would only 

 do his part in this great work, Nature could be safely 

 reckoned upon to do hers. 



Let us have a simple example of the working of this 

 vis medicatrix natures. If, in place of the financier, 

 who was a physiological variation from the normal, we 

 take the epileptic, or the man of insane temperament, 

 who represents a pathological variation, we shall find 

 that the same rule applies. If this man marry a person 

 of the same abnormal type as himself, that is, a mem- 

 ber of some highly neurotic family, the offspring will 

 inherit the predisposition or liability to insanity more 

 strongly than that present in either father or mother, 

 and its chance of passing through life without becom- 

 ing insane will be markedly less than that of either 

 parent. But if he marry a woman far removed from 

 the neurotic or insane type, the children will in all 

 probability inherit their father's abnormal quality but 

 slightly, and their liability to madness will be decidedly 

 less than his own; that is, the children will ''throw 

 back" to the healthy type. And as it is with mental 

 or nervous disease, so it is with physical We know, 

 for example, how the phthisical, and gouty, and scro- 

 fulous, and rheumatic temperaments can be and are 



