On the transmission from parent to offspring of some forms of disease and of morbid taints and tendencies / by James Whitehead.

  • James Whitehead
Date:
1857
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the transmission from parent to offspring of some forms of disease and of morbid taints and tendencies / by James Whitehead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    appearing in the offspring, had their origin in the parents, the grandparents, or the great-grandparents; and that such irregularities or defects were similar in their nature, form, and locality, to those which had pre-existed in their ancestors: that Nature employed the same instrumen- tality in transmitting them, whatever the mode of their origination may have been, and that a father begets children similar to himself, and fouled with like ble- mishes.1 The preceding observations are accordant with what has been contributed by writers of more recent date, of whom, however, with some few exceptions, the records of medicine furnish but a very defective display. Portal, who wrote more than a century and a half after the publica- tion of Mercatus’s article, has treated the subject with great judgment, though not very elaborately : his essay, however, is still one of the most valuable contributions we possess on the nature and treatment of this class of diseases. “We find,” says this author (quoting from Montaigne), “ that not only are the marks of the body transmitted from father to son, but also a resemblance of temper, complexion, and imitations of the mind.”2 An- other writer of the same period has some remarks of a 1 “ Circa primum, naturam hereditarii affectus genuina diffinitione patefacere studui. Quippe nil alius est quam qualitas, character, sigillatio, modus substantias, proportio qusedam aut disproportio vel impressis printer naturam in uno pluribus aut omnibus membris geniti impressa, a sui ortu ex vi seminis parentum, avorum aut proavorum a simili affectu in eorum, aliquo membro aut membris printer naturam quoque prseexistente: quo vcluti instrumento natura, vel causa alia utitur, ut natos sibi similes gignat et eadem labe fmdatos.”—Mercatus, ])c Moriis Ucreditariis, 1G19, t. ii. p. GG9. 2 On the Nature and Transmission of some Hereditary Diseases, translated in the Medical Journal, vol. xxi. p. 329.