SYPHILIS. 153 



These wretched children, being robbed of a large 

 part of their vitality, are predisposed to all sorts of 

 disease. They are peculiarly liable to diseases of the 

 nervous system, and a great number of them die from 

 inflammation of the membranes of the brain and 

 from convulsions, while the number that succumbs to 

 tubercular disease more especially of the bones and 

 joints, as seen in spinal and hip-joint disease shows 

 how good a field their weak nature offers to all the 

 micro-organisms of degeneration and death. 



But although death is so busy in the ranks of the 

 hereditarily syphilitic during the early years of life, 

 many of them drag through a more or less miserable 

 existence to what is to them maturity. Among these 

 the standard of development, physical and mental, is 

 generally low. In middle life they never reach old 

 age they succumb rapidly to acute febrile disease, 

 or the nervous system gives way and they become 

 insane or epileptic. Under circumstances which would 

 prove harmless to the robust, they develop phthisis 

 and various scrofulous disorders, and to their offspring 

 they transmit their degenerate natures and so deteriorate 

 the race. 



In some cases the child who has inherited syphilis 

 does not show any outward or active sign of it in the 

 early years of life, and occasionally it is not until 

 the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, or even twentieth year that 

 the inherited disease wakes up to activity (Fournier). 

 Such cases are, however, rare. In the vast majority 

 of cases where syphilis has been inherited, the dis- 

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