Any doctor looking at the portrait of her wizened, lined, and prematurely aged face would probably say, “That woman must have been a hereditary syphilitic,” especially if he knew the history of Henry VIII. I am surprised to see that in the actual record of her life there appears to be none of the usual symptoms of hereditary syphilis beyond the general ill-health that was hers all her days, poor creature. Doubtless the illness in her father was working itself out by the time that she was born. But she was very short-sighted; and possibly, as Sir Clifford Allbutt points out, this may have been due to “interstitial keratitis,” an affection of the cornea of the eye which is almost confined to hereditary syphilitics. So that in Mary also we see the effects of the “tragedy of the Tudors.” I am certain that that wizened face must come from hereditary syphilis, because one of the first patients I ever had looked extraordinarily like Mary Tudor, and the swellings on her arms for which she consulted me melted rapidly under the influence of mercury. Her photograph lies in my desk to this day as a perfect illustration of delayed hereditary syphilis. Queen Elizabeth No decent man would add to the slanders that have been passed upon this extraordinary woman, who stood at the head of the English nation when it was engaged in one of its fiercest struggles for very existence. These slanders are so numerous in quantity, but in quality so much alike, that they may all be summed up in one—slander against her sexual morality. Professor Chamberlin(2), evidently considering that the morals of a great queen of the sixteenth century should resemble those of a great queen of the nineteenth, spent many years in ascertaining the nature of the sicknesses from which she was said to have suffered. The farrago of somewhat quackish-sounding symptoms that he discovered has no meaning in modern medicine. She has been slandered quite enough, poor lady, and I for one shall not add anything to it. Rather than seek an explanation for the innumerable contemporary physiological slanders I propose to see whether they are possible.