On the foetus in utero : as inoculating the maternal with the peculiarities of the paternal organism in a series of essays now first collected / by Alexander Harvey.

  • Harvey, Alexander, 1811-1889.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the foetus in utero : as inoculating the maternal with the peculiarities of the paternal organism in a series of essays now first collected / by Alexander Harvey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    weight of evidence is, I think, strongly in favour of the presumption that the direct transmission of the virus is, com];)arativehj, of rare occurrence. Whether, as thus transmissible, a solution of continuity of some kind—(ulceration, abrasion, fissure,) is essential thereto, does not clearly appear; probably it is. But I am well satisfied of this, namely, that in as far as the disease is directly communicable, it is only as existing in a well-marked and palpable form, i.e., when the husband is unmistakaMy labouring under it. When existing in a very mild, or (as in Mr. Hey's case) in a latent form, I do not believe it to be transmissible otherwise than through the foetus. How it is that it should be so readily conveyed to the mother through this particular channel, one is not called upon to say. It were enough to establish it as a matter of fact. But a not unreasonable ex- planation of it may be given. An amount of the virus in any of the secretions of the man that might be inadequate to hurt the full-grown woman, may, as existing in his semen, be sufficiently potent to taint the embryonic cell fertilized in her womb That constituent of the semen which, infinitesimal as it is even in its totality, is adequate to the pro- duction of a new being, and to the implnnting- m it all the qualities, physical and moral, of the father, may contain enough of the virus to bear fruit, after its kind, in the fcetus. In the delicate tissues in the course of evolution within the embryo, and in the tonMon continnel of the vital changes which for nine months the embryo is, in a vei>