From James Paget 16 March 1863
1 Harewood Place | Hanover Square | W.
March 16. 1863.
My dear Darwin
I send you, by this same post, a pamphlet with an account of an interesting case of malformations associated & inherited—1 I ought not to have forgotten it when you asked me about such cases—2
And I enclose a paper which I turned-up a few days ago,3 and which may serve as an illustration of a class of facts which one meets with in practice among diseases, and which probably have their parallels among ‘malformations’ and other varieties of form:—namely, that the members of one family are not so likely to have, all, the same disease as to have different diseases more or less nearly related to one another— In one family, as in this, are various diseases of the nervous system: in another, of the skin; in another, of the stomach & so on.— Since one might expect, as a general rule, that a progenitor having any well marked variety of form would have offspring in some of whom the same form would appear, but none of whom would present a variety of forms related to, yet different from, that which was peculiar in the progenitor— I do not know if this can suggest to you anything about related groups of forms; but I shall not have wasted much of your time even if all this is not worth consideration.
Of course, the sentence you forwarded to me was all right.4
Always truly your’s | James Paget
Chas. Darwin Esqre.
Footnotes
Summary
Sends two [unidentified] papers on inheritance of medical malformations. Suggests that besides the inheritance of specific variations, the tendency to show variations in the same organ system (stomach, nervous, etc.) may also be inherited.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-4045
- From
- James Paget, 1st baronet
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- London, Harewood Place, 1
- Source of text
- DAR 174: 5
- Physical description
- ALS 4pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 4045,” accessed on 29 March 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-4045.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 11