Tuberculosis, heredity and environment / by Karl Pearson ... being a lecture delivered at the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, March 12, 1912.

  • Pearson, Karl, 1857-1936.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Tuberculosis, heredity and environment / by Karl Pearson ... being a lecture delivered at the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, March 12, 1912. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    TUBERCULOSIS, HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT If we study the history of medical opinion with regard to phthisis, which may readily be done in the recent very able paper by Dr. Bullock and Mr. Greenwood/ we find that in the past much weight has been given to the constitutional factor. To the great medical writers of the earlier part of last century the soil meant every¬ thing and the germ little at all, possibly—as some of their critics would now say—because they knew nothing about it. With the discovery of the tubercle bacillus the pendulum swung at once to the other side—the idea of infection dominated everybody, and the views of the clinician were replaced by those of the laboratory inves¬ tigator, who could determine, far more dogmatically than the clinician, the presence of tubercle. The result was an immediate neglect both of the hereditary factor and of the environmental factor. The origin of phthisis was infection, and the battle against phthisis was summed up in the destruction of the tubercle bacillus or of such environments as were supposed to encourage its ex¬ istence. The importance of the discovery of Koch cannot be overrated, but, as a result of it, a very definite line of action was taken without any adequate scientific inquiry into the relative importance ; (i) of the hereditary factor ; (ii) of the environmental factor ; (iii) of the liability to infection. ^ Royal Soc. Medicine, April, 1911.