2O2 



and in precisely the same manner, as it may inherit small-pox. 

 It inherits not the diathesis, but the disease. The reason 

 why the inheritance of small-pox is very rare, whilst that of 

 syphilis is, unfortunately, common, is simply that the period 

 during which the virus is extant in the blood is very different 



in the two cases My argument, if I have made 



it plain, has pointed to the conclusion that no minified 

 transmission of syphilis is possible ; that the child gets either 

 nothing at all, or the germs of the disease, and that in the 

 latter case they will, subject to the laws of idiosyncrasy, 

 develop equally in all cases." Whilst, therefore, regarding 

 the inheritance of syphilis as an illustration of actual trans- 

 ference of the germs of the disease, rather than transmission 

 of any diathetic peculiarities, it will be thus seen that for this 

 reason I regarded the syphilitic condition as one of dyscrasia 

 rather than of diathesis, and I thus purposely omitted it from 

 my classification of the latter. I therefore regard syphilis, 

 like the other specific fevers, as incapable to any great extent 

 of transmitting in the true sense any of its effects. It is 

 questionable whether the syphilitic virus itself is capable of 

 modification, and we must attribute the differences in its 

 results in different individuals to physical peculiarities in the 

 individuals themselves, some of which may have been 

 acquired and others inherited. 



I have now to consider a group of infectious diseases 

 which are non-contagious, and which, depending upon 

 malaria as their cause, are therefore purely miasmatic. 

 This group includes simple intermittent and masked fevers, 

 pernicious fevers, remittent and continued malarial fevers, 

 and malarial cachexia or chronic malarial infection. These 

 differ from the contagious specific fevers in the following 

 particulars. 



