230 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



proportion of cases they have discovered that a parent 

 or other near ancestor has actually suffered from 

 rheumatism. Now this is satisfactory only if we 

 recognise the rheumatic diathesis as an acquired 

 diseased condition, transmissible from parent to child, 

 but not transmutable. But if we recognise this 

 rheumatic diathesis as a degenerate condition, affect- 

 ing the whole economy, and therefore transmutable, 

 which may appear in the next and following genera- 

 tions unchanged, but which may in future generations 

 be transmuted to gout, epilepsy, scrofula, or insanity, 

 then I say such estimate of its hereditary character is 

 misleading. Let us treat it as other hereditary de- 

 generations. Is the child of the insane parent who 

 is an idiot, an epileptic, or an instinctive drunkard 

 not to be recognised as the inheritor of the parental 

 infirmity? Are the children of the confirmed epileptic, 

 who are respectively idiotic, deaf-mute, drunken, and 

 insane, to be considered free from the family taint 

 because their degeneracy has not proclaimed itself in 

 them by the identical symptoms found in the parent ? 

 Assuredly not. Why then should we refuse to recog- 

 nise hereditary taint in the victim of the rheumatic 

 diathesis whose parents have shown gout or scrofula, 

 apoplexy or insanity, or some other of the degenerate 

 conditions by which decay of the stock makes itself 

 known ? 



In the family history of a patient of my own, which 

 I have given at page 1 86 in the chapter on cancer, 

 we have seen how such apparently diverse symptoms 



