Chap. XIV. AT CORRESPONDING PERIODS. 79 



Asthma has attacked several members of the same family when forty 

 years old, and other families during infancy. The most different diseases, as 

 angina pectoris, stone in the bladder, and various affections of the skin, 

 have appeared in successive generations at nearly the same age. The little 

 finger of a man began from some unknown cause to grow inwards, and 

 the same finger in his two sons began at the same age to bend inwards in a 

 similar manner. Strange and inexplicable neuralgic affections have caused 

 parents and children to suffer agonies at about the same period of life. 42 



I will give only two other cases, which are interesting as illustrating the 

 disappearance as well as the appearance of disease at the same age. Two 

 brothers, their father, their paternal uncles, seven cousins, and their 

 paternal grandfather, were all similarly affected by a skin-disease, called 

 pityriasis versicolor; "the disease, strictly limited to the males of the 

 family (though transmitted through the females), usually appeared at 

 puberty, and disappeared at about the age of forty or forty-five years." 

 The second case is that of four brothers, who when about twelve years old 

 suffered almost every week from severe headaches, which were relieved 

 only by a recumbent position in a dark room. Their father, paternal 

 uncles, paternal grandfather, and paternal granduncles all suffered in the 

 same way from headaches, which ceased at the age of fifty-four or fifty-five 

 in all those who lived so long. None of the females of the family were 

 affected. 43 



It is impossible to read the foregoing accounts, and the 

 many others which have been recorded, of diseases coming 

 on during three or even more generations, at the same 

 age in several members of the same family, especially in the 

 case of rare affections in which the coincidence cannot be 

 attributed to chance, and doubt that there is a strong tendency 

 to inheritance in disease at corresponding periods of life. 

 When the rule fails, the disease is apt to come on earlier in the 

 child than in the parent; the exceptions in the other direc- 

 tion being very much rarer. Dr. Lucas 44 alludes to several 

 cases of inherited diseases coming on at an earlier period. I 

 have already given one striking instance with blindness during 

 three generations ; and Mr. Bowman remarks that this frequently 

 occurs with cataract. With cancer there seems to be a peculiar 

 liability to earlier inheritance : Mr. Paget, who has particularly 



700 2 ^T^T ^° m ' f ??' 678 ' ^ TheSe cases are ^en h J ^. 



* tL ' f t rt'A ' Apn1 ' 1863 - Sed ^ wick ' <* *>* authority of Dr. H. 

 p 449, and July, 1863, p. 162; Dr. J. Stewart, in < Med.-Chirurg. Keview,' 



?«!o nan ' St I ° n Heredltar y Dls ease,' April, 1863, pp. 449, 477. 



1843, pp. 27, 34. u , Hem Nat ; tom {{ p g52> 



