130 



toms in connection with pathological processes, whether 

 sensory, motor, or psychical. Science has as yet nothing 

 to say as to the real nature of this peculiar anomaly ; and 

 however some may seek to account for it by the aid of 

 "delicate trophic disturbances," or "modifications of 

 molecular arrangement " hypotheses so vague and useless 

 as to explain nothing we can only console ourselves with 

 the fact that such constitutional neuropathies really exist, 

 and that future researches will, it is to be hoped, throw 

 some light upon a question which is at present inscrutable. 1 

 Professor Erb, in referring to the hereditary neuropathic 

 predisposition, describes it as "that unfortunate condition: 

 which forms the inheritance of so many families, in which 

 the most diverse forms of neurosis are, so to speak, innate,, 

 and propagate themselves from one generation to another, 

 sometimes affecting chiefly the psychical, sometimes the 

 sensory, and sometimes the motor and vaso-motor regions of 

 the nervous system. To it many forms of neuralgia owe 

 their origin. Anstie, who has paid particular attention to this 

 neuropathic hereditary predisposition, attributes to it not only 

 a predisposition to psychoses, epilepsy, chorea, hysteria, 

 paralysis, etc., but also to phthisis, and states that in eighty- 

 three cases of neuralgia investigated with regard to this 

 point, he found there were seventy-one in which such a 

 family predisposition existed, and of these, fifty-three cases 

 occurred in neuropathic, and eighteen in phthisical families. 

 In such cases the coincidence of neuralgia with other neu- 

 roses, or its alternation with epilepsy, various psychoses, 

 migraine, etc., is not unfrequently observed. This hereditary 

 origin of neuralgia is of course most obvious in the not unfre- 

 quent cases where there is a direct hereditary transmission 

 1 Ziemssen. 



