epsy, and cancer.

Then there are diseases which for a long time puzzled us as to the
possibility of their inheritance, but which have now resolved themselves
clearly into instances of the fact that a mother who happens to contract
an acute infectious disease of any sort may communicate that disease to
the unborn child. If this occurs at an early stage of development the
child will naturally be promptly killed. In fact, this is the almost
invariable result in smallpox and yellow fever. If, on the other hand,
development be further advanced or the infection be of a milder
character, like scarlet fever or syphilis, the child may be born
suffering with the disease or with the virus in its blood, which will
cause the disease to develop within a few days after birth. This,
however, is clearly not inheritance at all, but direct infection. We no
longer use the term _hereditary_ syphilis but have substituted for it
the word _congenital_, which simply means that a child is born with the
disease.

There is no such thing as this disease extending "unto the third and
fourth generation," like the wrath of Jehovah. One fact must, of course,
be remembered, which has probably proved a source of confusion in the
popular mind, and that is its extraordinary "long-windedness." It takes
not merely two or three weeks or months to develop its complete drama,
but anywhere from three to thirty years, so that it is possible for a
child to be born with the taint in its blood and yet not exhibit to the
non-expert eye any sign of the disease until its eighth, twelfth, or
even fifteenth year.

The case of tuberculosis is almost equally clear-cut. In all the
thousands of post-mortem examinations which have been held upon newborn
children and upon mothers dying in or shortly after childbirth, the
number of instances of the actual transference of the bacilli of
tuberculosis from mother to child could be counted upon the fingers of
two hands. It is one of the rarest of pathologic curiosities and, for
practical purposes, may be entirely disregarded. When tuberculosis
appears in several members of a family, in eight cases out of ten it is
due to direct infection from parents or older children. This is
strikingly brought out in the admirable work done by the Associated
Dispensaries for Tuberculosis of the Charity Organization Society of New
York.

One of the first steps in advance which they took was to establish in
connection with every clinic for tu