Our brain, body and nerves / by Andrew Wilson.

  • Wilson, Andrew
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Our brain, body and nerves / by Andrew Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    124/170 page 110
    The nervous system must appear to each of us as an apparatus singularly connected with all problems ol inheritance. It is well known, for example, that certain traits, phases of mind, tricks and manners, are trans- mitted from parent to offspring in the most direct fashion, and also that diseases of the nervous system may with great facility be handed on from parent to child. There may be some doubt in the case of certain diseases whether these ailments themselves may be actually inherited. Thus when we speak of consumption being handed on from parent to child, it is probable we should rather talk of the tendency of the disease being trans- mitted. The child, in other words, is not born with the germs of consumption latent in its lungs and ready to develop the fell disorder of which they are the cause ; that which the child inherits is a weakly condition of lung (or body) that renders its frame a more likely soil for the growth or development of the germs than the lungs and body of the child born of healthy parents. But in the matter of nervous disorders there appears to be a singularly direct transmission of ab- normal conditions. Thus the chances that no
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