A pathological and philosophical essay on hereditary diseases, with an appendix on intermarriage and the inheritance of the tendency to moral depravities and crimes / by Julius Henry Steinau.

  • Steinau, Julius Henry.
Date:
1843
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A pathological and philosophical essay on hereditary diseases, with an appendix on intermarriage and the inheritance of the tendency to moral depravities and crimes / by Julius Henry Steinau. 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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    appeal to experience, by which it is proved that many children are born with diseases under which their parents laboured. Thus Kerkring mentions an example of a woman affected with jaundice, being delivered, in the eighth month of her pregnancy, of a still-born child, whose very bones had a yellow colour. Epileptic women often have children who very soon after their birth are attacked by the same dreadful evil. There are, especially, numerous examples of children being born with defor- mities and disorders in external parts, of which their parents likewise suffered. When we now further consider how often it may happen, according to the opinion of celebrated pathologists, that the very disease, not merely the disposition to it, remains for some time, as it were, latent in the organism, before it shews itself by certain symptoms, after having been roused either by itself or through additional causes, then the number of inherited diseases will certainly be greatly enlarged. This opinion, also, is not at all contrary to reason; at least it does not appear why the communication of the disease itself should be more difficult to be understood than that of the mere disposition thereto ; and we shall have opportunity of shewing, in the course of this treatise, how differently the manner in which diseases are inherited has been explained. It seems, therefore, the more advisable to follow the opi- nion of those who say, that not merely the disposition to a disease, but the disease itself, is inherited; which opi- nion has also been seconded by pathologists, such as Hartmann, Conradi, and others. The question, how it happens that sometimes the dis- position only, and sometimes the disease itself, is commu- nicated, must, like many others, for the present remain unanswered. One thing we know by experience, that deformities generally, and especially anomalies in the ex- ternal parts, as varus, supernumerary fingers, &c.; also
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