Re: (ReacTor) Five Futures Where the US Ended Not With a Bang But a Whimper

William Hyde  <wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

Scott Dorsey wrote:

William Hyde  <wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

Irrelevant.  Randolph was sick, possibly but not certainly from
syphilis.  Nothing heritable, at any rate.

 
But syphilis -is- heritable, and frequently was inherited in the 19th
century and the early part of the 20th before Dr. Ehrlich's cure.
 

As I understand it, the victim is contagious for a few years, but then,
though still infected, he no longer spreads the disease. So if Randolph
caught it - and it is far from clear that he did - it must have been
well before his marriage.

I mean heritable!  It gets passed on to children and the children grow
up with a congenital infection which causes poor growth and neurological
issues.  Sometimes this happens when the mother no longer has a secondary
infection.  

Not something that happens very often in the west today, but this was a
big deal in the 19th century and figures in a lot of old novels.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."