CHAPTER II 



ON THEORIES OF INHERITANCE WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE 

 INHERITANCE OF ACQUIRED CONDITIONS IN MAN x 



(1901) 



Questions of inheritance at the present moment occupy a curious 

 position in the minds of medical men and in medical literature. 

 To judge from the medical press, we medical men are very Gallios 

 — we care for none of these things. And yet, in family, as in 

 consulting practice, questions concerning heredity must and do 

 continually present themselves. In attempting to arrive at a 

 conclusion about a given case, we are bound to ask ourselves how 

 far the frailties or follies of progenitors are responsible for the 

 conditions found — how far the accidents or the sins of the indi- 

 vidual. Each succeeding day you must have this question of 

 possible inherited defect brought before you ; constantly must 

 you be forced not merely to inquire whether certain phenomena 

 are matters of inheritance, but assuredly to recognize that this or 

 other condition runs through all the members of a family and is 

 an inherited weakness. And yet, although the lay reviews dis- 

 cuss the matter familiarly, and although perchance the charming 

 partner you take in to dinner does the same, we scarce write about 

 these things, save in connexion with one or two branches of 

 medicine, and when we do, I have no hesitation in stating, though 

 it is a bold statement, that much of what is written is misleading. 

 Even in my own subject of pathology, treating as it does 

 of the causes, the processes, and the results of disease, in the 

 discussion of which the laws of inheritance should obviously be 



1 The first of a series of annual addresses under the auspices of the Brooklyn 

 Medical Club, delivered May 17, 1901. Reprinted from the New York Medical 

 Journal for June 1, 1901, and British Medical Journal. 



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