"Congenital" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suppressed was due to the fact that, like Old Sledge in the Kentucky Court, its exponents established it to be, not a game of chance, but skill, and such, indeed, it proved to every Yankee who put up his money against the bank. With an apparently congenital gift of sleight of hand, developed by years of practice at pitch penny from toddling babyhood to cock-fighting adolescence, the native could so manipulate the tools of his game that no outsider had the faintest "show for his money," while, as against each other, ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... congenital want. I am certain of it. And if I gave way, Anne, I should be a madman for days, perhaps weeks—a beast—oh, you have not the faintest suspicion; and all I am living for in the wretched present ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... or I attacked the subject first. I know we agreed. I suppose it is the same with all branches of the service. Combatant officers are, or used in those days to be, one in heart when discussing the Staff. I never met a doctor who did not think that the medical services are organised by congenital idiots. Every one from the humblest A.S.C. subaltern to the haughtiest guardsman agrees that the War Office is the refuge of incompetents. Padres, perhaps, express themselves more freely than the others. They are less subject to the penalties which threaten ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... There is a possibility that some advance, though a very small one, may be made by animals brought under the control of man. It is said, for instance, that a young pointer dog will sometimes point at game without any training. But in this case the acquired knowledge is congenital, and is therefore to be regarded as a development brought about by superintended selection. But with man none of the acquired knowledge is innate. It is a treasure entirely external to himself until he has ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... away, as Herbert Spencer tells us, from the stick which had hurt him while he was playing with it, it was because an unusual movement or pain produced by an object to which habit had rendered him indifferent, aroused in the animal the congenital sense of the intentional subjectivity of phenomena, and this is really the first stage of myth, and not of its subsequent form ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... what I thought the most typical, and overcame the reluctance of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade, but was presently out of work, and glad to ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... really ours," he utters a moral absurdity, and strikes at the root of all moral distinctions. He says, "The sinfulness with which we are born is really ours;" but in what sense ours? Only as any congenital disease may be called ours. If a man is born with a tendency to consumption, blindness, lameness, he may say, "my lameness, my near-sightedness." But no one would suppose that he meant thereby to hold himself ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... half his waking hours with self-analysis, and to grit his teeth at his own impotence. But there was no strength, no virile grip to take his fate in his own hands and mould it like a man. He only mourned his disadvantages, and sometimes blamed destiny, sometimes a congenital infirmity of purpose, for the dreary course of his life. Nature alone could charm his sullen moods, and that not always. Now and again she spread over the face of his existence a transitory contentment and a larger hope; but the first contact with facts swept it away ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... become speech readers in some small degree, a relative degree of facility in articulation is not nearly so attainable. As to the accuracy of this view, the writer cannot venture an opinion. Judging from the average congenital deaf-mute who has had special instruction in speech, it can safely be asserted that their speech is laborious, and far, very far, from being accurate enough for practical use beyond a limited number of common expressions. This ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... "You have a congenital dislike to start anything on any old day," I retorted, still sore from my lost Saturday. "And if you knew the owner of that house as I do you would know that if there was any one at that window he is ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... can be made to burst by tying all the venous outlets from it. I have seen very high intra-ocular tension develop in a few hours after general thrombosis of the orbital veins. The absence of the canal of Schlemm is noted in congenital buphthalmos. The enlargement of the anterior perforating veins is an old symptom of chronic glaucoma. Obstruction to outflow of blood through the vorticose veins, by the increased intra-ocular pressure, ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... listened to Bartley's proposal, Hope's answer, and all that followed. Then he put this and Colonel Clifford's communication together, and saw the terrible importance of the two things combined. Thus, as a congenital worm grew with Jonah's gourd, and was sure to destroy it, Bartley's bold and elaborate scheme was furnished from the outset with a most ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... cook's superiority to the American in preparing fish is that the former has almost a congenital knowledge of his subject. To him all fish is not just fish. He differentiates sharply as to species, tempering his treatment to ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... effort. He decides this, of course, for himself, by the introspective method alone. He (with M. Cousin and other philosophers who take the same view) does not apply the analytical method to inquire whether his necessity of belief may not be a purely acquired necessity and nowise congenital. It is, indeed, remarkable that these philosophers do not even seek to apply the introspective method as far as that method will really go. They are satisfied with introspection of their own present minds; without collecting results of the like process as applied to other minds, in different ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... scheme after Pope's death came into the hands of Gray, who for a time was fired with the notion of writing the History in collaboration with his friend Mason. Knowing Gray's congenital self-distrust, you will not be surprised that in the end he declined the task and handed it over to Warton. But, says Mant in his Life of Warton, 'their design'—that is, Gray's design with Mason—'was to introduce specimens ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... all emerge from the depths and run up to Town to breathe the sweet original atmosphere for just one night before we leave old England," put in Trooper Punch Peerson (son of a noble lord) who would at that moment have been in the Officers' Mess but for a congenital weakness in spelling and a dislike of mathematics. "Pity we can't get 'leaf,' and do ourselves glorious at the Carlton, and 'afterwards'. We could change at my Governor's place into borrowed, stolen, and hired evening-kit, paint the village ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... third and terrible element besides her congenital and conjugal inferiority which contributes to make the figure arid and gloomy; to reduce it, narrow it, distort it fatally. Is not one of the most flattering unctions a woman can lay to her soul the assurance of being something in the existence of a superior ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... as their own critics when they denounce the actual motives of the able man as he is and as they say he always has been. They attack the typically able man of all periods as a monster of congenital selfishness, and it is men of this special type whom they propose to transform suddenly ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... or deaf and dumb from birth. Extremely different races people the earth—on the one hand, unintelligent and cannibal negroes; on the other, the proud, handsome, and intelligent, though selfish and cruel white race. Again, from a moral standpoint, who can explain congenital tendencies to crime, the vicious by birth, the wicked by nature, the persons with uncontrollable passions? Wherefore are thrift and foresight lacking in so many men, who are consequently condemned to lifelong poverty and wretchedness? Why this excess of intelligence, used mainly for the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... morality and honor, systems of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized, established until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more perfect means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life, vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid, gorilla, as well as of man is the history ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... either to some want of harmony between different organs, some faulty formation or combination of parts, or to some peculiar physical or chemical condition of the blood or tissues; and that this altered state, constituting the inherent congenital tendency to the disease, is duly transmitted from parent to offspring like any other quality more readily apparent ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... a germinal variation, belonging to the same large class as all other biological variations, occurring, for the most part, in the first place spontaneously, but strongly tending to be inherited. It thus resembles congenital cataract, deaf-mutism, the susceptibility to ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... a congenital sentimentalist, her tendency confirmed by a long course of novel-reading, would have loved a female Fauntleroy, and hoped to find it in each of her brother's children in turn—only to be bitterly disappointed when they came to an ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... The disease is sometimes congenital, arising from conception during the menstrual period. For the corrupt blood within the maternal body, which forms the nourishment of the fetus, leads likewise to the corruption of the latter. Sometimes the disease is the result of a corrupt diet, or of foul air, or of ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... begin with the lancelet and its disputed head, and end in the Catarrhine or Old World monkey. No a priori induction will ever extend this line or plexus to man. The developmental chain, if indeed there be one, has no congenital link that will either drag man down to the "beast of the earth," or lift the latter up to the transcendent plane of humanity. Each must remain specifically in his own type, whatever may be their vertical tendencies, upwards or downwards.[8] And this word "type" ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... gold-seekers, chiefly aliens from the United States, plunged into the wilderness of Athabasca without hesitation, and without as much as "by your leave" to the native. Some of these marauders, as was to be expected, exhibited on the way a congenital contempt for the Indian's rights. At various places his horses were killed, his dogs shot, his bear-traps broken up. An outcry arose in consequence, which inevitably would have led to reprisals and bloodshed had not ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... called the "perfect" instinct. To be perfect, an instinct must be carried out successfully by the animal when his organism is ready, without any instruction, any model to imitate, any experience to go upon. The "perfect" instincts are entirely congenital or inborn; the nervous apparatus only needs to reach the proper stage of maturity or growth, and forthwith the instinctive action is performed as soon as the external conditions of life are such as to make its ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... only retained the principle of utility and selection, but made it the only principle, rejecting entirely the action of external conditions as a cause of congenital modifications, i.e. of characters whose development is predetermined in the fertilised ovum. It is to Weismann that we owe precise and definite conceptions, if not of the nature of heredity, at least of the details of the process. From him we learned ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... on, only the King's mucketeers—and members of the official underground—were allowed to carry epees. These men, it might be noticed, were the congenital adventurers, men who needed to swashbuckle and revel in the name ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... and 63 in poor and in rich quarters. These and similar figures showed that women living in comfort and luxury did not want to be bothered with confinements. It had been said that the degree of sterility could be regarded as an index to the morals of a race. Congenital sterility was rare, but the number of children born in England was decreasing. It had been estimated that one-third of the pregnancies in several great cities abroad aborted. Dr. Gibbons then quoted figures ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... healed those who were maimed from their birth ([Greek: tous ek genetaes paerous] [Endnote 280:2]). The word [Greek: paeros] is used specially for the blind, and the fourth Evangelist is the only one who mentions the healing of congenital infirmity, which he does under this same phrase [Greek: ek genetaes], and that of a case of blindness (John ix. 1). The possibility urged in 'Supernatural Religion,' that Justin may be merely drawing from tradition, ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... favorable to the development of the blush. It is scarcely an accident that, as has been often observed, criminals, or the antisocial element of the community—whether by the habits of their lives or by congenital abnormality—blush less easily than normal persons. Kroner (Das koerperliche Gefuehl, 1887, p. 130) remarks: "The origin of a specific connection between shame and blushing is the work of a social selection. It is certainly an ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... demanding the "single standard of morals." It is doubtless true that many women are less amorous than their lords— are to some extent the victims of the latter; but before assuming that this defect is congenital it were well to inquire if there be not an efficient post-natal cause. It is no compliment to woman to urge that she contributes unwillingly to the world, would fain ignore the God-given law to "be fruitful and multiply." Regardless of the affected horror ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... unexampled prosperity" in which you indulged during the latter part of 1904 and the following year? Of course you do. Everybody was talking about prosperity, and a stranger visiting the United States might have concluded that we were a nation of congenital optimists. Yet, it was precisely at that time, in the very midst of our loud boasting about prosperity, that Robert Hunter challenged the national brain and conscience with the statement that there were at lease ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... straight, Chief—I would rather believe Lawrence guilty than any other person—except perhaps Barker—with whom I have come in contact since this investigation began. He has one of the most unpleasant personalities I have ever known. He is a congenital grouch. But he told his Nashville story so frankly—and then became so panicky with surprise when my questioning showed him that his alibi was rotten—that we must not ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... rollin' a statesman as ever packs a bowie or wins the beef at a shootin' match in old Kaintucky. Yes, sir,' says the Colonel, an thar's a pensive look in his eyes like he's countin' up that ancestor's merits in his mem'ry; 'pol'tics with me that-away is shore congenital.' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... nor reason of, your Past, Nor explain to Him your congenital weakness, But come, for He is remorseless, Call Him unjust, but come, Do not mock or defy Him, for he will prevail. He regardeth not you, He hath swallowed the worlds and the nations, He hath humor, too: disease and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... before they are mature and properly qualified. The lack of proper training deprives many of the workers, in all branches, of the best protection against functional nervous diseases which any person can have, namely, a well-trained nervous system. This struggle for existence by the congenital neuropath or the educationally unfit forces many to the use, and then to the abuse, of stimulants and excitants, and herein we have another important exciting cause. This early and excessive use of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco is especially deleterious in its action upon the nervous system ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... discernible difference between his brain and that of a highly intelligent and cultivated person. The dumbness might be the result of a defective structure of the mouth, or of the tongue, or a mere defective innervation of these parts; or it might result from congenital deafness, caused by some minute defect of the internal ear, which only ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... untitled aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once acknowledge. There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary. Their names are always on some college catalogue or other. They break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out. At last some newer name takes their place, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... remarked Richard on that explosive occasion, addressing the French constables, "I'll buy your town and burn it." The last with a splendid disdain of limitations that was congenital. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... being careless. So I learned that I must not say two words even when I saw them." As Miss Alida S. Williams, principal of Public School 33 in New York City, has in many articles and addresses freely illustrated from school experience, the art of seeing is acquired, not congenital, and every human being who possesses it ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... which I have been insulted, and with me goes the suggestion of forgiveness or of murder and vengeance. And then it is assumed that a man has his complete free will, unless he is influenced by circumstances explicitly enumerated by the law, such as minority, congenital deaf-muteness, insanity, habitual drunkenness and, to a certain extent, violent passion. If a man is not in a condition mentioned in this list, he is considered in possession of his free will, and if he murders he is held morally responsible and ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... cell as a simple undifferentiated cell. In some way it already contains the characters of the adult, and when we remember that the characters of the adult which are to be developed from the egg are already determined, even to many minute details—such, for instance, as the inheritance of a congenital mark—it becomes evident that the egg is a body of extraordinary complexity. And yet the egg is nothing more than a single cell agreeing with other cells in all its general characters. It is clear, then, that we must look upon organization as something superior to cells ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... have heard of no well-authenticated instance of hermaphrodism, or the complete union of all the reproductive organs in one individual. True, the term hermaphrodite is often applied to certain persons in whom there is some malformation, deficiency, or excess, of the genital organs. These congenital deformities consisting of combined increase or deficiency, supernumerary organs, or transposition of them, which usually render generation physically impossible, have been called bisexual hermaphrodism and classed as ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... aware of the frequent dependence of menorrhagia upon anemia, not only acquired, but congenital. The existence of anemia, or of an imperfect elaboration of the blood and vascular system, previous to the occurrence of the first menstruation, is a possible condition of menstrual disorder that must always be very carefully eliminated before any other cause be assigned. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... call a congenital infirmity, my dear. No use lamenting over what you can't help. Worship me as much as you like; it keeps you out of mischief. But you might change the tune now and then, and give me some of ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... friends." And sometimes she baptized me, the bath-tub being her Jordan, in the name of duty, love, and patience. In truth, Aunt Judy took as much prophylactic pains with my soul as if it had been tainted with a congenital sulphuric diathesis; and if I had sunk under a complication of profane disorders, no postmortem statement of my spiritual pathology would have been complete and exact which failed to take note ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... a sneaking fellow, so much worse than to inherit a hump-back or a couple of club-feet, that I sometimes feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I may use this expression, with a certain tenderness which we need not waste on noble natures. One who is born with such congenital incapacity that nothing can make a gentleman of him is entitled, not to our wrath, but to our profoundest sympathy. But as we cannot help hating the sight of these people, just as we do that of physical deformities, we gradually eliminate them from ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that, but claimed the identification not complete as he doubted whether, strictly speaking, I could be classified as a congenital idiot. Windy pointed out that evidently I had traded Tiger for the gyasticutus. Wooden admitted that this proved me an idiot, but not ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... are more frequent. I have seen numerous cases of goitre, and very often the so-called hare-lip. Webbed fingers also are frequently noticed; while inguinal hernia, both as a congenital and as an acquired affection, is unfortunately all too common. The natives do not undergo any special treatment until the complaint assumes alarming proportions, when a kind of belt is worn, or bandages of home ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... corners in the ice box where her waning-in-enthusiasm fingers failed to reach. But on a night when the New York thermometer ranges up toward the nineties it is a pure and unadulterated joy to labor inside an ice box. I scrubbed and rinsed and wiped until Schmitz almost looked approving. Only it was congenital with Schmitz that he never really showed approval of anything or anybody. Schmitz was the kind (poor Mrs. Schmitz with her three months only of freedom) who always had to change everything just a little. There would ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... would be the exertions, or use and disuse, that would be the main agents in the modification. But it is not often that Mr. Wallace thus backslides. His present position is that acquired (as distinguished from congenital) modifications are not inherited at all. He does not indeed put his faith prominently forward and pin himself to it as plainly as could be wished, but under the heading, "The Non-Heredity of Acquired Characters," he writes as follows on p. 440 of his recent ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... mutilated limb, unequaled in mechanism and utility. Hands and Arms of superior excellence for mutilations and congenital defects. Feet and appurtenances for limbs shortened by hip disease. Dr. HUDSON, by appointment of the Surgeon General of the U> S> Army, furnishes limbs to mutilated Soldiers and Marines. REFERENCES—Valentine Mott, M.D., William Parker, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years afterwards happened to her when she ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... soldiers who make ideal first sergeants and are ruined and ruinous as second lieutenants; and there are soldiers who are worthless as first sergeants, but irresistible as major-generals. Eddie was a born first sergeant, a routine man, a congenital employee—doomed, like fire, to be a splendid ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Just as a congenital dislocation of the hipbone suggests the name of Doctor Lorenz, so the slightest dislocation of the cloak and suit business immediately calls for Henry D. Feldman. No cloak and suit bankruptcy would be complete without his name as attorney, either for the petitioning creditors or the bankrupt, ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... over the farm-walls and fences. From this ram was descended the breed of ancon, or otter, sheep. Now the stimulus which had excited this variation must have been applied early in embryonic life, or perhaps during the formation or maturing of the germ-cells themselves. Such a variation we call a congenital variation. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... inquire, the more reason there appears to be for believing that peculiarities of race are themselves originally formed by the influence of external circumstances on the primitive tribe; that, however marked and ingrained they may be, they are not congenital and perhaps not indelible. Englishmen and Frenchmen are closely assimilated by education; and the weaknesses of character supposed to be inherent in the Irish gradually disappear under the more benign influences of the New World. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... man, began to ask questions about Helen. Was she normal? Was there anything congenital or hereditary? Had anything occurred that was likely to alienate her ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... there was something more than an acute interference with the intellectual processes, such as we are here discussing. As a matter of fact, we have the statement in the history that the patient herself said she was slow at learning in school and had not much of an education. A congenital intellectual defect and the attitude which it creates may, however, as my experience has repeatedly shown me, very greatly exaggerate an acute thinking disorder. The case, therefore, while it shows us an unquestionably acute interference ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... Dr. O.W. Morris, who had quoted freely from Bemiss),[8] and enlarged greatly upon its fallacies. He also collected statistics of the deaf-mutes in Paris, and, by an amazing manipulation of figures, "demonstrated" that consanguinity of the parents was the cause of nearly one-third of the cases of congenital deafness. The savants of the Societe d'Anthropologie took sides and the debate became very entertaining. Finally M. Dally came to the rescue, and published some very sane and logical articles which avoided both extremes, and first advanced the theory that any ill effects of consanguineous ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... "Temporary Mechanical Substitution for the Left Ventricle in Man," pp. 642-644, and "Pulmonary Volvuloplasty under Direct Vision using the Mechanical Heart for a Complete Bypass of the Right Heart in a Patient with Congenital Pulmonary Stenosis," ...
— History of the Division of Medical Sciences • Sami Khalaf Hamarneh
... lost. Death was inevitable. Of this there could be no doubt, but to die beneath the rending fangs of the carnivore, congenital terror of her kind—it was unthinkable. But there was an alternative. The lion was almost upon her—another instant and he would seize her. Pan-at-lee turned sharply to her left. Just a few steps she took in the new direction before she disappeared over the rim of Kor-ul-lul. The ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... suggest that she would have been quite so slow in separating goats from sheep. But let me say that THEA and IRENE have had dedicated to them an exciting and amusing fritto misto of crooks, demi-mondaines, blackmailers, gamblers, roues, murderers, receivers and decent congenital idiots of all sorts. The characterisation is adroitly done and the workmanship avoids that slovenliness which makes nineteen out of twenty books of this kind a weariness of spirit to the perceptive. I wonder if Maisie ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... is an experience universal at one time of life or another; but the reaction to it is infinite in variety; and while part of it depends upon the congenital dispositions which are the common property of humanity, a larger part is contingent upon the psychogenetic factors which have stamped ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... inheritance of physical and mental defects. Indirectly, therefore, there is such a thing as hereditary pauperism. Now we know from the labors of Weismann that acquired characteristics are not inherited, but only congenital, or inborn characteristics. It is not the characteristics, in other words, which are acquired from the influence of environment that are transmitted to offspring, but the characteristics that arise through variations in the germ, caused by forces which are not yet well understood. Defects that are ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... example. I can assure you this is no exaggeration, but a portrait. It seems to me that the thing must be pathological, that he and this goodness of his have exactly the same claim upon Lombroso, let us say, as the born criminal. He is born good, a congenital good example, a sufferer from atrophy of his original sin. The only hope I can see for Bagarrow, short of murder, is forcible trepanning. He ought to have the seat of his ideals lanced, and all this wash about doing good to people by stealth ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over again, even to her bones and marrow.—Whether gifted with the accident of beauty or not, she should have been moulded in the rose-red clay of Love, before the breath of life made a moving mortal of her. Love-capacity is a congenital endowment; and I think, after a while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of it.—Proud she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride, in the sense of contemning others less gifted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... a congenital absence of some faculty which I ought to possess which withholds me from adopting this summary procedure. But I am not ashamed to share David Hume's want of ability to discover that polytheism is, in itself, altogether absurd. If we are bound, or permitted, to judge ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... stricture or complete occlusion of the vagina, congenital or acquired from cicatricial contraction, obstructing delivery, and in some the impregnation seems more marvelous than cases in which the obstruction is only a thin membranous hymen. Often the obstruction is so dense as to require a large bistoury to divide it, and even that ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Jurgis was looking for work occurred the death of little Kristoforas, one of the children of Teta Elzbieta. Both Kristoforas and his brother, Juozapas, were cripples, the latter having lost one leg by having it run over, and Kristoforas having congenital dislocation of the hip, which made it impossible for him ever to walk. He was the last of Teta Elzbieta's children, and perhaps he had been intended by nature to let her know that she had had enough. At any rate he was wretchedly sick and undersized; ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... turned his scowl on her because, damn it, she was laughing like hell at the whole thing. And, by God, a secretary didn't have the right to laugh at a United States Senator, even with her eyes, no matter how much a congenital idiot ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... only one, that salvation consists in the identification of these two, and is attained by knowledge, the intuition of their identity, and that the phenomenal universe or manifold of experience is simply an illusion (maya) conjured up in Brahma by his congenital nature, but really alien to him—in fact, a kind of disease in Brahma. This was not new: it had been taught by some ancient schools of Aupanishadas, and was very like the doctrine of some of the Buddhist idealists; but ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... alcoholic inheritance which have been traced by careful observers are: Morbid changes in the nerve centers, consisting of inflammatory lesions, which vary according to the age in which they occur; alcoholic insanity; congenital malformations; and a much higher infant death rate, owing to lack of vitality, than among the children of ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... living brain. The size and elaboration of this peculiar structure throughout the animal kingdom stand in conspicuous proportion to the degree of intelligence displayed; while the impairment of this structure, whether by congenital defect, mutilation, anaemia, decay, or appropriate poison, entails corresponding impairment of mental processes. Thus much being established, no reasonable man can hesitate in believing the relation between neurosis and psychosis to be a constant and concomitant relation, so that the step between ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... cysts, frequently congenital, are met with in one situation, just over the external angular process of the frontal bone. These are larger in size than the preceding, ranging from the size of a barley pickle to that of an almond. Their treatment is excision by a prolonged ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... congregating. That would have been something for you, my friend! I fancy seeing you,—not walking, but limping,—after all the pretty girls and women! I did not dance, neither did I spoon;—the first because I was too tired, the second because of my congenital bashfulness. But I saw with great pleasure how all these people hopped about delightedly to the music of my 'Figaro' turned into contradances and Allemands. Here nothing is talked about except 'Figaro,' nothing played, piped, sung or whistled except 'Figaro;' ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him, In the presence of the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she began to feel that. He sank ...
— Different Girls • Various
... parents has presented it.[16] Secondly, myopia, or short-sight, in which the eye is egg-shaped, and too long from front to back; the retina in this case lies behind the focus, and is therefore fitted to see distinctly only very near objects. This condition is not commonly congenital, but comes on in youth, the liability to it being well known to be transmissible from parent to child. The change from the spherical to the ovoidal shape seems the immediate {9} consequence of something like inflammation ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... pull through the afternoon without notably disgracing my distinguished host and patron; and, too, without referring even to 'secretarial work.' I might have been heir to a dukedom, a distinguished remittance man, or even a congenital idiot, for all the company was allowed to gather from me as to ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... opportunity of closely examining or experimenting with it, they are eager to "read it up," as they might any other machine. That is the case of the average aspirant, who has neither the instinct of the theatre fully developed in his blood, nor such a congenital lack of that instinct as to be wholly inapprehensive of any technical difficulties or problems. The intelligent novice, standing between these extremes, tends, as a rule, to overrate the efficacy of theoretical instruction, and to expect of analytic criticism ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... self, we seek to give it more power of doing so by giving it public recognition and authority, and embodying it, so far as we can, in the State. It seems too much to ask of Providence, that while we, on our part, leave our congenital taste for the bathos to its natural operation and its infinite variety of experiments, Providence should mysteriously guide it into the true track, and compel it to relish the sublime. At any rate, great men and great institutions have hitherto seemed necessary for producing ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... principles analogous to those laid down by science for the forms and functions of the body during its period of growth; it is a freedom in which the head, the nose, and the ears will attain the highest beauty, and the gait the utmost perfection possible to the congenital powers of the individual. Thus here again liberty, the sole means, will lead to the maximum development of character, intelligence and sentiment; and will give to us, the educators, peace, and the possibility of contemplating the miracle ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... are right almost by accident, because of the blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or effect, a mass of 'jarring atoms,' ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... races, and its meagre coat betrayed the deplorable habit of sleeping in coal-holes and subsisting on an innutritious diet. In addition to these physical disadvantages, its shrinking and inconsequent movements revealed a congenital weakness of character which, even under more favourable conditions, would hardly have qualified it to become a useful member of society; and Millner was not sorry to notice that it moved with a limp of the hind leg that probably doomed it to ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... to his fellow men, and to civilization in general. What you call crankiness in old people, so trying to the younger generations, does not arise from natural hatefulness of disposition and a released congenital selfishness, but from atrophying glands, and, no doubt, a subtle rebellion against nature for consigning men to ineptitude when they should be entering upon their best period of usefulness, and philosophical as well as ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... sons of Pandu. For then, if the Pandavas, from association, feel an attachment for Duryodhana, then, O king of men, good fortune may be thine. (This, however, may not be)! For it hath been heard that one's congenital nature leaveth him not till death. But what do Bhishma and Drona and Vidura think? What also dost thou think? That which is beneficial should be done while there is time, else thy purposes will ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... the outskirts of the town in a line as nearly straight as the congenital deviousness of Sialpore's ancient architects allowed. There was not a street but turned a dozen times to the mile. At one point she bade Dick stop, and begged Tess to let Tom Tripe take her home, promising to see her again within the ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... not see Christina, I left Theobald near Battersby and walked back to the station. On my way I was pleased to reflect that Ernest's father was less of a fool than I had taken him to be, and had the greater hopes, therefore, that his son's blunders might be due to postnatal, rather than congenital misfortunes. Accidents which happen to a man before he is born, in the persons of his ancestors, will, if he remembers them at all, leave an indelible impression on him; they will have moulded his character so that, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... artistic form, which, from poverty of wit, is most commonly employed recognition by signs. Of these some are congenital,—such as 'the spear which the earth-born race bear on their bodies,' or the stars introduced by Carcinus in his Thyestes. Others are acquired after birth; and of these some are bodily marks, as scars; some external tokens, as necklaces, or the little ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... constitution, the children of intemperate parents frequently suffer from an abnormal psychical organization. As in the progeny of insane, epileptics, suicides, and criminals, so also among the children of drunkards, do we see cases of congenital idiocy and imbecility, of neurasthenia and inebriety, of psychical and somatic degeneracy, also of depraved morality, of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... absurd. We see that certain actions, such as gestures, gait, and so forth, resulting from the most complex concurrences of brain, nerves and muscles, are hereditary. Is it reasonable to suppose that the brain alone of all the organs performs its work according to its own sweet will, free from congenital tendencies? Is it not a familiar fact that racial characteristics are persistent?—that one race is stupid and indocile, another quick and intelligent? Does not each generation of a race inherit the intellectual qualities of the preceding generation? How could this ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... on Saturday morning, by the maiden sister of her divinity. Miss Isabella Shepherd was a fair, short, pleasant young woman, with a nervous, kindly smile, and a congenital inability to look you in the face when speaking to you; so that the impression she made was that of a perpetual friendliness, directed, however, not at you, but at the inanimate objects around you. Laura was so tickled ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... putties, he looked an extremely absurd object. Private Augustus Grobble looked a little more convincing, inasmuch as his fattish figure filled his uniform, but the habit of wearing his helmet on the back of his neck and a general congenital unmilitariness of habit and bearing, operated ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... no brand that was snatched from the burning; no sot who picked himself or was picked from the gutter; no drunkard who almost wrecked a promising career; no constitutional or congenital souse. I drank liquor the same way hundreds of thousands of men drink it—drank liquor and attended to my business, and got along well, and kept my health, and provided for my family, and maintained my position in ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... soul. Duty itself is not adequately conceived and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too feeble and fitful in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action. Play is from within from congenital hereditary impulsion. It is the best of all methods of organizing instincts. Its cathartic or purgative function regulates irritability, which may otherwise be drained or vented in wrong directions, exactly as Breuer[24] shows psychic traumata ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of the national character is properly understood, all the German shoddy which is so much talked about seems no longer the swindling practice of dishonest tradesmen, but is simply the material expression of their ingrained Kantianism, and their congenital inability to distinguish ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... defects, from the slightest misconduct to the most flagitious crime, Pantocyclus attributed to some deviation from perfect Regularity in the bodily figure, caused perhaps (if not congenital) by some collision in a crowd; by neglect to take exercise, or by taking too much of it; or even by a sudden change of temperature, resulting in a shrinkage or expansion in some too susceptible part of the frame. Therefore, concluded that illustrious ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... too bold to suppose that some ancient Linaria, or allied form, and some ancient Viola, had all petals spur-shaped, and that all cases of "irregular peloria" in these genera are reversions to such imaginary ancient form? (660/3. "'Regular or Congenital Peloria' would include those flowers which, contrary to their usual habit, retain throughout the whole of their growth their primordial regularity of form and equality of proportion. 'Irregular or Acquired Peloria,' on the other hand, would include those ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... for weeks, nay, months over the purchase of a book; not because they did not want it, nor because they deemed the price exorbitant, nor yet because they were not abundantly able to pay that price. Their hesitancy was due to an innate, congenital lack of determination—that same hideous curse of vacillation which is responsible for so ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... told her," exploded Diana, with more than her congenital exasperation. "I have told her, and she doesn't seem to mind. She still says she's going away with ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... "fools are the game that knaves pursue," and no well-informed member of the community needs to be informed that the victims captured by quack advertisements are not among the wiser portion of the community. Many of them, however, lie open to be allured into the quack's net, not by mere congenital and absolute folly, but because of the inexperience of youth or lack of knowledge of the world, or perhaps in some cases from a natural deficiency in the faculty of deciphering characteristic expression. There are some who fail to recognize a quack advertisement when it meets their ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... actually in your coffers; but with your prospects, surely you can sign something, or make over something, or back something, say a post obit or post vincula, or employ some other instrument? Excuse my inexperience; or, I should say, excuse my congenital inability to profit by experience, now considerable, of DIFFICULTIES—and of friendship. Let not the sun of May-day go down on ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... induces Atheism, some very eminent Christians have been marvellous hypocrites. Lack of reverence is the next cause of Atheism, and is indeed its "natural soil." But as Professor Blackie thinks this may be "congenital, like a lack of taste for music, or an incapacity of understanding a mathematical problem," we are obliged to consider this third class of Atheists as hopeless as the first. Having admitted that their malady may ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... acquirements have no effect on the child. Surely no evidence could be stronger."* [[* The undoubted transmission of siphilis [tr. note: sic] to off-spring might be regarded as a case of transmission of an acquired characteristic. But the case is not in point since congenital siphilis [tr. note: sic] is, properly, due to a prenatal infection, the bacillus entering the very germ-plasm of the human ovum (egg). Medical science, generally, has become very cautious in the use of the word "hereditary." There is almost unanimity among medical men in the denial of heredity ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... course of instruction which entitles them very commonly to a diploma from the police court. But they only illustrate the working of the same tendency in mankind at large which has been occasionally noticed in the sons of ministers and other eminently worthy people, by many ascribed to that intense congenital hatred for goodness which distinguishes human nature from that of the brute, but perhaps as readily accounted for by considering it as the yawning and stretching of a young soul cramped too long in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... father's brother, and if any win her from him a death and a blood-feud may result. It was the same in a modified form amongst the Jews and in both races the consanguineous marriage was not attended by the evil results (idiotcy, congenital deafness, etc.) observed in mixed races like the English and the Anglo-American. When a Badawi speaks of "the daughter of my uncle" he means wife; and the former is the dearer title, as a wife can be divorced, but blood is thicker ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... it be with us then? Will Daniel Lambert, the mammoth of men, appear weighing half a ton? Will the Siamese twins then be again joined by the living ligament of their congenital band? Shall "infants be not raised in the smallness of body in which they died, but increase by the wondrous and most swift work ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... I mused. You see, even now I couldn't get rid of him as the drifter, the gutter Hamlet, the congenital howler against fate. "You'll what?" I repeated under my breath, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... forms of the country, and can be studied only on the spot; but he will not take the trouble to inquire into the relation which the separate States bear to the Federal government; and he seems prevented by some congenital deficiency from understanding how the latter is the direct result of the independence of the former. The question he asks most frequently is, "Why has not an independent State the right to secede?" He is infected by nature with Mr. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... disease, but a congenital condition in which the intellectual faculties are either never manifested or have not been sufficiently developed to enable the idiot to acquire an amount of knowledge equal to that acquired by other persons ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... to be practically inconvenient, if not impossible, because changes occurring in the brain in very early life impair the functions of that organ so completely as to induce the same helpless condition which is found in congenital cases. We dismiss now one distinction which has been drawn between idiocy and imbecility—that the former is, and that the latter is not, necessarily congenital; one arising from the supposition that infantile mental deficiency is less likely to be so grave an affection than that which has been ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... for them, showing their origin in the peculiar nature of the social order which so long prevailed in Japan. This is a study of Japanese psychogenesis. The question to which we shall continually return is whether or not the characteristic under consideration is inherent and congenital and therefore inevitable. Not only our interpretation of Japanese evolution, past, present, and future, but also our understanding of the essential nature of social evolution in general, depends upon the answer ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... my diffidence—finally my financial condition. Then I asked her if she wished to be my wife. Naturally her answer was 'yes.' The fearful agonies which I have experienced since that night are not to be expressed in words. This is only natural. To live for thirty-seven years in congenital antipathy to marriage, and then suddenly to be made a bridegroom through the sheer force of circumstances, without being in the least charmed by the bride—that is something horrible! In order to get back my senses and accustom myself to the thought of the future, I decided to go ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... far the greater number of variations seem to be due to the so-called congenital causes, which are sharply contrasted with the influences of the first and second classes. It is quite true that the influences of the third class cannot be surely and directly demonstrated like the others, but however remote and vague they themselves may appear ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... REPORTS OF HOSPITALS.—The reports of hospitals for lunatics almost universally assign intemperance as one of the causes which predispose a man's offspring to insanity. This is even more strikingly manifested in the case of congenital idiocy. They come generally from a class of families which seem to have degenerated physically to a low degree. They ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... few aeons I should find eternity hanging heavy on my hands. But it isn't that, exactly, and it would be hard to say what my objection to immortality exactly is. It would be simpler to say what it really is. It is personal, temperamental, congenital. I was born, I suspect, an indifferentist, as far as this life is concerned, and as to another life, I have ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... of his inglorious function, with the wife on one hand and the lover on the other. He is not ill-looking; he has hair of a ruddy gold, which naturally curls, and his eyes are dark, a combination which I always regard as the mark of some congenital deficiency, physical or moral; his features are irregular but pleasing; the nose perhaps a little short, and the mouth a little womanish; his address is excellent, and he can express himself with point. But to pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... (symmetric keratodermia), as regards the local condition, is a somewhat similar affection. It consists of hypertrophy of the corneous layer of the palm and soles, usually of a more or less horny and plate-like character, but is congenital or hereditary, and not necessarily dependent upon local friction ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... daughters were not "intellectual." The ladies themselves were the first to lament their deficiency, to own that nature had denied them the gift of making the most of their opportunities. A profound veneration for their parent and an unswerving faith in his doctrines had not amended their congenital incapacity to understand what he had written. Laura, who had her moments of mute rebellion against destiny, had sometimes thought how much easier it would have been if their progenitor had been a poet; for she could recite, with feeling, portions of The Culprit Fay and of the poems of Mrs. ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... running—consistent only in its inconsistency. Having apparently ridden straight for awhile, it is now time to expect some "pulling." His shameful concessions to the Unionist party may be taken as a clear indication of his congenital crookedness, and the refusal of the Nationalists at Killybegs, on the visit of Lord Houghton, the other day, to give a single shout for the Grand Old Man, bears out my previous statement as to the popular feeling. Amid the carefully ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... but usually pass out of the abdominal cavity and descend to their permanent position before birth. The opening in the abdominal wall is usually completely closed in a short time; but occasionally it remains open, giving rise to congenital hernia, an accident in which a loop of intestine follows the testicle down into the scrotum, either completely or partially. In a few animals, as in the porcupine, the opening is never fully closed, and the testis remains in ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... five sixths ready-made as soon as he can control his hands intelligently, we are forced to suspect either that keyboards and shorthand are older inventions than we suppose, or else that acquirements can be assimilated and stored as congenital qualifications in a shorter time than we think; so that, as between Lyell and Archbishop Ussher, the laugh may not be with Lyell quite so uproariously as it seemed fifty ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... nastiness. Dirt for dirt's sake has never been the apparent aim of any great English humorist who had not about him some unmistakable touch of disease—some inheritance of evil or of suffering like the congenital brain-sickness of Swift or the morbid infirmity of Sterne. A poet of so high an order as the author of "Sophonisba" could hardly fail to be in general a healthier writer than such as these; but it cannot be denied that he seems to have been somewhat inclined to accept the illogical ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... first attention bestowed upon inversion gave rise to the conception that it was a congenital sign of nervous degeneration. This harmonized with the fact that doctors first met it among the nervous, or among persons giving such an impression. There are two elements which should be considered independently in this conception: ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... bring their daughters to hear the opera, and might possibly discontinue their subscriptions." Everybody will agree that "expert opinion" can hardly go further, yet the folly which this "expert" was betrayed into did not arise from any congenital stupidity; it is the mistake that you and I, every one of us, would make when we seek the truth in our casual experience instead of ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... causes of deafness. Among those able to give skillful nursing and to obtain good medical aid the number of cases resulting in deafness is reduced to a minimum. Accidents, too, causing deafness, occur more frequently among those unable to give their children proper care. Congenital deafness is also probably greater among the laboring classes, and is undoubtedly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... I did not meet with in Sahalin. There is very little congenital syphilis, but I saw blind children, filthy, covered with eruptions—all diseases that are evidence of neglect. Of course I am not going to settle the problem of the children. I don't know what ought to be done. But it seems to me that one will do nothing by means of philanthropy ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... complete and easy competence. One had only to look at him, from the slant of his bald forehead and the curve of his beautiful fair moustache to the long patent-leather feet at the other end of his lean and elegant person, to feel that the knowledge of "form" must be congenital in any one who knew how to wear such good clothes so carelessly and carry such height with so much lounging grace. As a young admirer had once said of him: "If anybody can tell a fellow just when to wear a black tie with evening clothes and when not to, it's Larry ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... branches into which the original stock divides; in other cases, the hereditary tendency is to gentleness and harmlessness of character, with a full development of all the feelings and sensibilities of the soul. Others, again, exhibit congenital tendencies to great physical strength and hardihood, and to powers of muscular exertion and endurance. These differences, notwithstanding all the exceptions and irregularities connected with them, are obviously, where they exist, deeply seated and permanent. ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott |
