184 



rickets, and that the differences observed between the two 

 maladies are chiefly due to the very different condition of 

 the osseous system as regards its development at the time of 

 attack." Facts are forthcoming which support this view; 

 thus Trousseau records a case in which osteo-malakia attacked 

 a woman of seventy, who had been rickety in childhood. 

 Mr. Hutchinson also mentions a case (the skeleton of which 

 is in the Brighton museum) where the man had lost two feet 

 of his stature from innumerable fractures, faulty union, and 

 the bending of his bones. The children of this man were 

 much deformed by infantile rickets. As to the identity 

 of osteo-malakia with rickets occurring at a later period of 

 life, and the heredity of both, with regard to the former it 

 should be remembered that the rachitic diathesis is dependent 

 upon defective diet and absence of warmth and sunlight ; 

 that, as a general rule, it is only temporary, existing no longer 

 as soon as the defective surroundings and diet are supplanted 

 and neutralised by warm, dry, pure air, sunshine, and judi- 

 cious dietetic treatment. Yet it is probable that in the few 

 rare cases of mollities ossium which occur, it may have been 

 reproduced, or developed de novo, under circumstances 

 similar to those on which its primary production depended. 

 Be this as it may, there is much in common in rickets and 

 mollities ossium for which the rachitic diathesis satisfactorily 

 accounts ; and when we remember that both spring from and 

 are perpetuated by constitutional conditions involving 

 defective nutrition, we need have no hesitation, especially in 

 the light of the affirmative evidence recorded, in regarding 

 both affections as transmissible by heredity. 



General Disorders of Nutrition. The series of disorders 

 which I now propose to consider may be regarded as 

 entirely constitutional, and, therefore, all the more likely to 



