arrest such changes, to prevent their progressing, and confessing his inability to remove the existing disease, to arrest its course at the point to which it may have attained. Perhaps, the period of age is not really more prone to disease than youth or maturity; but, unquestionably, it is less capable of resisting its baleful influence, of combating its development and progress, and of restoring the part attacked, or the general system to a tone of healthful activity. It is hence, probably, that some diseases have been considered most likely to occur in age, because age is less capable of resisting their attacks. It matters, however, but little, if this view of the case be precisely correct or not; it is at all events manifest that a most watchful guard should be kept against the approach of those evils chiefly to be apprehended, so that they may be met at the very threshold, and not be permitted to gain admittance; this is most particularly the case with regard to those affections which appear to pass as hereditary possessions in certain families, as Gout, Insanity, Asthma, Cancer, Apoplexy, Consumption, &c.

It should be remembered that disease is never really hereditary; all that can be so called is a predisposition or liability to be affected by certain diseases, such a peculiarity of frame or constitution

diseases, but whose rud-grad or unde, er aunt may have been se feral

Dr Fanshand in his

karned work on The Func Exory of Man." en

fumes, më ir: 1 descrvad by the mmunity oỀ

ere genericCU mus & person may be very sub

IF 2005 N DISEASE.

sil make the less ananie han hers of

arching ause du rice is momach. No one is wasthanach. r nsanity-secreted as

bodily peculiarities tend to become hereditary, whilst changes in the organic structure of any individual from external causes occurring during life commonly end with him, and have no obvious influence on his progeny; but if this be taken as a general law, it is difficult to understand how any disease could ever have become hereditary, for all peculiarities must have been, at some time, acquired. The difficulty here is the same as that regarding certain diseases, as measles, scarlatina, &c. &c., being invariably considered as the result of contagion. The first case must have been sporadic. The first peculiarity of organisation or constitution must have been acquired.

Even as children will resemble one parent in form and feature more than the other, so has it been well observed that the constitutional tendency to disease appears to follow the line of the parent more nearly resembled: thus, of several children of a gouty father, that one who most resembles him will in all probability be most liable to attacks of gout. Sir H. Holland has given many curious instances of transmission of disease which he has noted; the most remarkable perhaps being that of hydrocele, occurring in three out of four generations successively, the break in succession having arisen from the individual being a female, whose son had the disease. This elegant

124

DECLINE OF LIFE IN DISEASE.

be

writer quotes Boerhaave, to show that not only are many diseases hereditary, but that they evolve themselves at particular periods of life. "Novi in hac urbe familiam, in quâ omnes certâ ætate schirrum accipiunt, et hoc malum ab ovo parenti liberis est communicatum; uti et familiam ubi omnes certâ ætate icterum accipiunt, et sic orto postea hydrope moriuntur. Novi etiam aliam familiam ubi omnes primo satis faceti, sed certâ ætate in melancholium incidunt." (Boerhaave, Prax. Sect., 485.) "When the disease," says Sir H. Holland, (Med. Notes and Ob., p. 41,)" depends on anormal conformation of some organ, it may brought into active shape, either by the accumulated effect of exciting causes long continued, or by the operation of new causes, coming into operation at certain periods of life. We may affirm then," says the same author (p. 29), "that no organ or texture of the body is exempt from the chance of being the subject of hereditary disease. Or, in other words, every part is susceptible of deviations from the normal type or natural structure, capable of being conveyed to offspring, and of producing morbid actions, which are thus, under the name of disease, frequently propagated through successive generations. Of the instances given, to which others might have been added, it will be remarked that they are all perfectly congruous with

the common transmission from parent to offspring of the external features of the body, in the peculiarities of which no diseased action is involved.

and difficulty are alike of the two cases."

The wonder

This view

of the subject, illustrated as it is by the quotation from Boerhaave, by many other cases, and also by the undeniable fact, that it is only at certain advanced periods of life that many hereditary diseases appear, would imply that it is not a liability or tendency to disease which is hereditary; but that the seeds of the disease itself (morbus ipsissimus) are actually transmitted, that they lurk in the organisation ab origine, and become developed with the progress of time, even as one of our poets declares:

"As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,
Receives the lurking principle of death;

The young disease, that must subdue at length,

Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength;
So, cast and mingled with his very frame."

The features and the frame of the body have from the first definite forms, which are afterwards developed ; but if any original abnormal organisation of any part in the like manner exist, it is impossible to conceive that any disease which such abnormal conformation would induce could lie dormant for many years, such abnormal organisation existing throughout that period;