American Practice of Surgery, Vol. 2 of 8

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Excerpt from American Practice of Surgery, Vol. 2 of 8: A Complete System of the Science and Art of Surgery, by Representative Surgeons of the United States and Canada States. He says: Many of those who brought the disease with them have had numerous progeny there, none of whom were affected by the parental malady. I have never found lepra among those born in America. Of one hundred and fifty-six lepers settled there (in America), none were there attacked by the mal ady and none left it as an inheritance to their descendants. There has never occurred a single case of lepra in America that can be adduced as inherited. If that could have taken place among the numerous persons I have seen related nearly or distantly with lepers, we should have had one at least. Heredity is so tenacious a thing that it could not have been excluded in the stream of human ity ¿owing from Norway to America. Dr. J. T. Reeve, secretary of the State Board of Health of Wisconsin, writing in 1883, states, from an inquiry into the subject of imported cases and their descendants, that in the cases in which it has been imported into the Northwest by immigrants, its tendency has been to die with the patient, that its reputed hereditary character has been rarely if at all manifested, and that there are now living in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa the perfectly healthy widows, children, and grandchildren of those who were lepers. The British Leprosy Commission, in 1893 after careful investi gation in two thousand cases of leprosy in India, reported that leprosy in India cannot be considered an hereditary disease, and the evidence which exists is hardly sufficient to establish an inherited predisposition to the disease. Leprosy has not been seen in the foetus. It has been reported once or twice in the newly born, but is extremely rare before the fifth or sixth year. The disease is sometimes seen in the first and third generations of a family, the second being exempt, and many instances are observed in which children develop the disease first, their parents afterward. The old theory of heredity received little notice at the hands of the Berlin Lepra Conference in 1897, and it may now be properly regarded as of historic interest only, as in the case of tuberculosis. In the ah sence of any evidence that leprosy is ever hereditary in the scientific sense, and in the light of modern pathological and clinical knowledge of bacillary diseases, heredity in leprosy must be definitely rejected. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.