The Abiotrophy

Sir ARCHIBALD GARROD said that in rare diseases were to be found the keys to not a few dark places in physiology and pathology. At the time of the First Empire, when the French universities were in the melting-pot, tllere were established in some of the medical schools professor- -ships for the exposition of rare cases and diseases; and in the Dictionnaire des Sciences ,Mdicales (1813) there was an article by Fournier on rare cases which extended to 120 pages. In British medical journals and transactions the speaker had -found.oily two addresses on -this subjecta series of Bradshaw Lectures by Sir James Paget in 1882, and a previous oration to the Medical Society by Sir Jonathan Hutchinson in 1889. Paget observed: " We ought not to set them [rare cases] aside with idle thouglhts or idle words about 'curiosities ' or 'chbances.' Not one of them is without meaning; not one that might not become the beginning of excellent knowledge, if only we could answer the question-Why is this rare? or, being rare, why did it in this instance occur? " The study of what might be styled Nature's experiments was of special value, anid many lessons which rare maladies taught could hardly be learnit in otlher ways. In conclusion, the orator spoke of some rare maladies the lessons of which had been learnt onily in part or not at all. The syndrome known as intermittent hydrartlhrosis had features which might be described as uncanny. Effusion into the knee-joint here recuri ed with a riegularity comparable to that of some forns of malaria, and was clearly not connected with the life-history of any parasite.