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and with regard to this affection, which has been denominated 

 the most chronic and most persistent of all specific fevers, it 

 may be remembered that I did not include it in my classifi- 

 cation of the diatheses, and I may now be permitted to give 

 my reason. It may, indeed, be inferred from what I have 

 already said as to the non-transmissibility of any of the 

 effects of the specific fevers, and that this holds good also in 

 the case of syphilis, I think I shall be able to show. Diathesis 

 has been defined as "any condition of prolonged peculiarity 

 of health giving proclivity to definite forms of disease ; " and 

 referring this definition to syphilis, to which there is no 

 physical proclivity, we see that syphilis is more clearly a 

 matter of dyscrasia than of diathesis. Moreover, as in the 

 other specific fevers, there is no actual transmission of any 

 diathetic peculiarity, as, in the words of Mr. Hutchinson, " it 

 is not the diathesis which results from the disease, but the 

 germs of the disease itself the particulate elements of the 

 virus which are transmitted. It is transference, a form of 

 contagion rather than hereditary transmission, which occurs. 

 .... It is far more like contamination in utero than true 

 inheritance. By contamination, in this use of the word, I 

 mean that with sperm or germ (of either or of both parents) 

 there passes the virus itself, the sperm or germ being itself 

 unmodified, but simply the material medium of transference. 

 In the case of the mother we know well that it is not 

 necessary that the germ should have been infected at all, but 

 that if her blood receives the virus, even so late as the eighth 

 month, it will pass into that of the child also. Inherited 

 syphilis, when produced under these last-mentioned circum- 

 stances, runs exactly the same course as when derived from 

 a parental taint which existed before conception. A child, 

 then, I assert, inherits syphilis in precisely the same sense, 



