100 YEARS AGO

The Cultivation of Man. The author of this book is very much in earnest. He condemns modern civilisation in strong terms for its many vices, especially for its worship of money and the mammonite marriages that result from it, and urges that men should apply to their own species the methods of the breeder of cattle. He recommends polygamy, apparently in all seriousness, and not as a mere counsel of perfection. It would, of course, destroy the family, but to this Mr. Witchell has no objection... Certainly he speaks out fearlessly, and that is no small merit. But it is to be regretted that he did not study his subject more before writing. “Natural selection,” he says, “is sometimes operative, chiefly among the poor.” Considering that in England nearly fifty per cent. of the population die before the average age of marriage, this is a wonderful understatement. If we bear the facts in mind, we can hardly agree with Mr. Witchell that the business man is “the surviving type,” i.e. apparently the type that is to survive to the exclusion of others. Business men are not a separate species. There is a continual upward movement of able men from the great underlying social stratum, and from this stratum directly or indirectly our successful men, as we call them, have emerged.

From Nature 20 October 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

Anatomist, pathologist, epidemiologist, sanitarian and clinician, and one of the most advanced thinkers in the history of the medical sciences, Giovanni Maria Lancisi was born in Rome three hundred years ago, on October 26, 1654... It was at [Pope] Clement's request that in 1707 he wrote his monumental treatise “De subitaneis mortibus”, in which he carefully records the pathological lesions of the brain and heart observed at autopsy, gives the first description of syphilis of the heart and of growths on the valves, and lists hypertrophy and dilatation of the heart as a cause of sudden death. Lancisi's book, “De motu cordis et aneurysmatibus” (1728), is another landmark in the history of heart disease, for it stresses the significance of heredity, syphilis and violent emotions as causes of aneurysm... In the tercentennial year of his birth he is gratefully remembered chiefly for having laid the foundation for a true understanding of the pathology of the heart.

From Nature 23 October 1954.