i6 3 



Try as we may, there is no such thing as getting rid of 

 heredity, for it is the inexorable law of our being. No 

 force in Nature can be lost ; and as whatever we have or 

 are we owe to heredity, save the action of our environment, 

 we must bow to the inevitable, and admit that as our 

 physiological and psychological being is subject to the 

 action and interaction of this great law within us, so also 

 we are more or less predisposed to the morbid processes 

 which assail us during our lives, and that these predisposi- 

 tions we shall pass down to our children, however ignorant 

 we may be of the fact, or however we fail to recognise or 

 appreciate it. As the past slumbers in each one of us, so 

 do the potentialities of the future the welfare and 

 commonhealth of our race ! 



Hepatic Diseases. The foregoing arguments as to the 

 influence of heredity in diseases and disorders of the kidneys 

 and chylo-poietic viscera, apply with equal force, for obvious 

 reasons, to diseases and disorders of the liver. I need not 

 here recapitulate them in any detail. Of the degenerative 

 diseases of the liver cancer, cirrhosis, amyloid degeneration, 

 fatty infiltration, etc., it may be safely said, irrespective of 

 their proximate causation, that, at least the majority, if not 

 all of them, are dependent upon constitutional conditions, 

 and that a predisposition to each of these, either in the 

 person of the afflicted parent or of his children, is more or 

 less, but almost invariably, inherited. Let us briefly consider 

 these diseases of the liver in the above-mentioned order, and 

 with especial reference as to how they are affected by heredity. 

 With regard to diseases of the liver in general, Frerichs in 

 his great work remarks that " the data heretofore established 

 are not sufficient to secure to heredity a positive influence." 

 That he was at least mistaken with regard to hepatic cancer, 



