Читать книгу Old Age Deferred. The causes of old age and its postponement by hygienic and therapeutic measures онлайн

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Even character and appearance may be inherited by offspring. The height of parents is, as a rule, though not in every case, inherited by their children, as also are many features of their external appearance. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the size of an individual and his outward appearance are dependent on the internal secretions of the ductless glands; and as these qualities are inherited, so we may presume that the properties of the ductless glands, which produce these effects, may also be inherited; and that this is not a vague supposition is demonstrated, we think, in a paper we read on the subject of heredity at the German Congress of Internal Medicine at Leipzig, in 1907, in which we showed that the alterations of the ductless glands are inherited with remarkable frequency. Thus Graves’s disease can frequently be inherited, and the children descended from such parents, especially after puberty, often have a small goiter. In such cases a slight protuberance of the eyes can also be noticed; they are frequently very nervous, and any sudden shock will be sufficient to induce a typical case of Graves’s disease. Oesterreicher^[112] found 9 cases of exophthalmic goiter in one family. The frequent instances of heredity in Graves’s disease are insisted upon by Brouwer^[113] and other authors.