Photiuirnphir R«'Hean'hes ainl Port rait an' 'Jftl 



Jacobs ^avi" liim lielp. Tlie first |)H|)er is eiititl«Hl : "An lufjuiry into the 

 Physiognomy of Piithisis by the Method of Composite Portraiture'." It 

 coiit'iiiis ilhistnitions of 47 conipoHites and of 1 I 3 individual portraits. There 

 is thus a ifrejit wealth of material to judj;e by. Unfortunately, and prolmbly 

 unavoidably, the portraits are all small, the itidividual smaller than the 

 composite portraits, and this, I ventiire to think, h\ssen8 the accunvcy of 

 judgmtuits based on comparisons of this illustrative material. 



The (juestion raised by Mahomed and Galton was whether there was 

 any justification for a Ijelief in a phthisical diathesis ; it is of course clear 

 that such may exist without involvinj; a phthisical physiognomy- It is 

 further possible that if such a physiognomy exists, it might Ixi produced by 

 the action of the disease itself The material consisted of 261 male and 

 181 female photographs of phthisical subjects between 15 and 45 years of 

 age taken partly at Guy's Hospital and partly at the Brompton and the 

 Victoria Park Hos|jital8 for l)isea.ses of the Chest. A schedule for each 

 subject dealt witli : Age — extent of disease (advanced, moderate, slight) — 

 duration of disejise (chronic, over 3 years ; medium, 1 to 3 years ; brief, 

 under I year) — hereditary taint (strong, some, none) — onset of disease 

 (insidious, or preceded by severe haemoptysis, bronchitis, pneumonia, pleurisy, 

 syphilis, gout, alcoholism). These chi-ssitications enabled composites' of 

 various groups to be made. As control two series of female patients, each 

 fifty in number, and a series of male patients 100 in numljer, all suffering 

 from diseiises other than phthisis, were taken without selection. 



When all individual phthisical patients were compounded without selec- 

 tion, a composite was obtained strikingly like the composite portrait of the 

 non-phthisical: see our Plate XXXI V. If there be made selections of the 

 narrow, ovoid or ' tubercular ' faces from the phthisical and non-phthisical 

 patients, or again of broad faces with coarser features from the two groups, we 

 again reach com|)osites closely resembling each other. In other words both 

 phthisical and non-phthisical patients contained representatives of the same 

 two types. Further, of the non-phthisical women 15°/^ gave the naiTow ovoid 

 face while only ll'6 7o of patients with phthisis presented it. Among males 

 the proportion of narrow ovoids was only IS'/o ^^ t.he non-phthisical patients 

 and 190 7^ among the phthisical on the best estimation. Taken altogether 

 the phthisical cases showed 14"37^ and the other than phthisical 140/^ of 

 the narrow ovoid or so-called ' tubercular ' physiognomy. The ' tubercular ' 

 physiognomy is therefore not more common among the phthisicjd than the 

 non-phthisical diseased population. Mahomed and Galton writ« : 



"Let us here emphasise tlie fact that we are now comparing phthisis with other disease*, and 

 not with the healthy popuUition, and these ob.servations would seem to show that a delicate 

 person may fail in many ways hesides Iwing phthisical, and that a delicate narrow ovoid face 

 may mean liability to other diseases not nece-ssarily tubercular." (p. 13.) 



' Guy's Hospital Reports, Vol. xxv, February, 1882. 



' In this paper a compound of composites is termed a co-coia]x>site, and if several co-com- 

 posites are compounded the i"csult is termed a co-co-composite. Comj>osites and coco com- 

 posites are positives, and require to be reversed before printing from them. 



37— i 



