Dec., 1889. 
THE MIDLAND UNION. 
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also shown that the children of gouty parents developed the 
disease generally some years earlier than their parents. For 
example, the father would have it at forty or fifty, the children 
at twenty to twenty-five. Further, the younger children were 
more liable to suffer than the elder. Now what was gout ? 
It was known that the symptoms were due to an excess of 
uric acid in the blood. It was believed by many that this 
excess was due to some injury inflicted on the liver by over 
feeding and over drinking, which prevented it properly 
fulfilling one of its functions, that was the conversion of 
the nitrogenous portions of the food into soluble urea. Now 
most medical men would hold that this injury inflicted on the 
liver might in some subtile way be transmitted to the 
offspring, so that their livers bore as it were the imprint 
of their father’s disease, and were therefore, when the 
slightest strain was thrown upon them, more likely to 
break down than were the healthy livers of other children. 
Again, take the case of consumption. It was known that 
something like thirty-five to forty per cent, of the children of 
one consumptive parent developed consumption, but when 
both parents suffered from it nearly a hundred per cent, 
developed and died of this disease. It was now known that 
consumption was due to the growth and development of a 
vegetable organism in the lungs. And medical men believed 
that the growth and development of this organism in the lung 
produced some change in it, the imprint of which change 
could be transmitted to the lung of the offspring, rendering 
the lung much more liable to be attacked by the organism 
than an ordinary healthy lung. Another example he might 
give was that of haemophilia, a disease characterised by 
immoderate bleedings; so that patients suffering from this 
disease would bleed spontaneously, or the slightest cut 
or the removal of a tooth would be followed by bleeding 
so severe and so difficult to arrest as to endanger life. 
Now it was held that this tendency was due to some 
subtile change in the walls of the blood-vessels which 
rendered them much weaker than the walls of healthy 
vessels, but the way in which the disease was transmitted 
was exceedingly interesting. The disease descends to the 
boys through the mothers, the women remaining quite 
healthy. Thus, one boy of a family of six acquires the disease, 
he marries, his sons and daughters are apparently healthy 
and do not suffer, but the disease again appears among the 
male children of his daughters, and so on from generation to 
generation. One other point he would like to mention, and 
