83 



tinguish individuals, and the due recognition of which so 

 intimately concerns the processes of disease and their 

 treatment. 



To supply any adequately satisfactory classification of the 

 diatheses is simply an impossibility, owing principally to the 

 facts that our present knowledge of them is far too vague 

 and imperfect, and that their relative differentiation is very 

 frequently dissimilar in kind. It would be easy enough to 

 classify diatheses under such heads as temporary and per- 

 manent acquired and inherited, but in such a classification 

 it would be often necessary to place the same morbid con- 

 dition under more than one class, which would, therefore, 

 lead to confusion and complexity. I shall, therefore, whilst 

 glancing at the classification of the older writers, materially 

 adopt that of Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson, which is formed on 

 a more scientific basis, and bears more particularly upon the 

 life-history of pathological processes. In the text-books of 

 a few decades ago we find the recognition of the following 

 diatheses viz., the gouty, rheumatic, cancerous, tubercular, 

 and strumous. The two first are still recognised, but the 

 third is now acknowledged to be a dyscrasia rather than a 

 diathesis, and the two last are generally associated together, 

 as consequences of inflammatory action in predisposed 

 individuals. Curiously enough, Professor Laycock (to whom 

 we owe so much in everything pertaining to the differences 

 between man and man), in enumerating his classification of 

 the diatheses, gives the following viz., the arthritic, the 

 strumous, the nervous, the bilious, and the lymphatic. Dr. 

 Milner Fothergill follows suit. But, to my mind, both of 

 these authorities are mistaken in mixing up temperaments 

 with diatheses, and in not estimating the differences between 

 them. For, as the temperaments are purely physiological, 



