Constitution and Fitness

The equipment of man to combat adverse influences that may confront him from time to time is evidently made up of various factors, some of which are inborn, whereas others are the product of environmental influences. To what extent these factors enter into what is popularly termed human constitution or, by medical writers, diathesis, remains for the most part the subject of rather personal speculation. “Constitution” has been defined lately as that aggregate of hereditarial characters, influenced more or less by environment, which determines the individual’s reaction, successful or unsuccessful, to the stress of environment. The author of this definition has added, by way of explanation, tha t the “characters” referred to are infinite in number and variety, so that for simplification some sort of grouping is necessary; hence he selected for this purpose four “panels of personality,” involving morphology, physiology, psychology and immunity. To what extent the technic of physical anthropology may throw light on diathesis or tendency to certain diseases was indicated in a rather novel way in a recent issue of The Journal. It is commendable boldness to attempt to interpret the “clinical hunch” or unconscious skill of the older clinicians in terms of anthropometric data; y et the recently secured statistics already indicate that the incidence of gallbladder disease and that of gastric ulcer fall into unlike categories of anatomic “constitution,” with which p...
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research