Surely we who have for years been much occupied with the superstition, for such it now {356} turns out to be, of heredity in medicine, will not be supercilious toward older generations and their superstitions. Until a few years ago we were perfectly sure that a number of diseases were inherited directly. Tuberculosis, rheumatism, gout, various nutritional disturbances all were supposed to pass from father to son and from mother to daughter, or sometimes to cross the sex line. For a time cancer was deemed to be surely hereditary to some degree at least. Now most of us know that probably no disease is directly inherited, that acquired characters are almost surely not transmitted, and that while defects may be the subject of heredity, disease never is. Not only this, biological investigations have served to show that what is the subject of inheritance is just the opposite,--resistance to disease. A person whose father and mother had suffered from tuberculosis used to think it almost inevitable that he too should suffer from it. If they had died that he too would die. Our experts in tuberculosis declare now, that if tuberculosis has existed in the preceding generation there is a much better chance of the patient recovering from it, or at least resisting it for a long time, than if there had been no tuberculosis in the family. We had been harboring the superstition of heredity, the surviver opinion from a preceding generation, until we learned better by observation. Let us turn from such discussion to the {357} beginnings of the story of our medical profession as it has been revealed to us in recent years.