Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 4.djvu/293

 Rh disease, spine disease, are sufficient evidence; but their absolute proportional superiority in point of frequency, relatively to other districts, cannot be considered as established on the present evidence. Most of the surgeons had, at the period of my inquiries, some patients rendered lame by scrofulous disease of the hip and knee joints; some partially recovered; some still under treatment.

If it should be satisfactorily proved that scrofulous diseases are really more common in this district, some circumstances might be mentioned as possibly helping to explain the fact, and particularly two, viz. first, the very relaxing nature of the climate, from its great humidity and the singular equability of its temperature; and, second, the frequent intermarriage of families, from the confined and isolated position of the district. This latter circumstance is likely to operate in two ways,—first, by generating the strumous diathesis in healthy subjects, on the well known principle of breeding in-and-in; and, secondly, by tending to develope and strengthen the predisposition when already existing. There is no fact better established in physiological pathology, than that the offspring of parents, both of whom are touched with any hereditary malady or morbid predisposition, are likely to exhibit the same malady or morbid predisposition in a greater degree than either of the parents.

Consumption.—It will not be denied by any experienced pathologist, that the disease strictly termed phthisis, or consumption, or tuberculous consumption, is, in reality, one of the forms of scrofula; neither will it be doubted, although other diseases of the