8o INFECTIOUS AND PARASITIC DISEASES. 



to include inebriates and consumptives has many 

 arguments in its favor. 



From the view-point of the body, individual 

 Individual, predisposition is the principal factor in 



the spread of infectious diseases. With 

 few exceptions it is operative in every case, so that the 

 study of the various conditions which lead to it involves 

 considerations of the highest importance to physicians, 

 nurses, and sanitarians generally. Individual predis- 

 position may either be inherited or acquired. If inher- 

 ited, it is seldom to any particular infection but to all. 

 We no longer believe in an inherited predisposition 

 to a special disease, as was formerly the case with tuber- 

 culosis, but rather in the inheritance of an especially 

 susceptible state of the body-tissues which predisposes 

 to all manner of infections. Not alone are the children 

 of the consumptive markedly prone to consumption 

 but also the children of all parents who at the time of 

 conception were either in an impoverished state of 

 health from disease, or whose vital resistance was 

 depressed by alcohol, drugs, or by deprivations of one 

 kind or another. The reason that the consumptive's 

 offspring has fewer chances of escaping tuberculosis 

 than the child of the non-tuberculous, is because the 

 atmosphere of its home is, in the majority of cases, 

 through ignorance, vitiated by the germs of its parent's 

 malady. Besides a general predisposition such as we 

 have been discussing, a predisposition to local disorders 



