Hereditary disease and its control.

Waren Tay was born in 1843; he qualified in medicine at the London Hospital and was appointed to it as a surgeon. He was also on the staff of the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital at Moorfields and City Road, and the North East Hospital for Children, which became Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Hackney Road. A versatile man, he was also dermatologist to the Hospital for Diseases of the Skin. In 1881 he reported his findings in the eyes of a 1-year-old child with severe muscular weakness. Six years later, in 1887, Bernard Sachs gave a detailed clinical and pathological account of the disease and gave the name "cherry red spot" to the macular changes. He recognized that the condition was hereditary and occurred in Jewish babies and called it amaurotic family idiocy. He was born in Baltimore in 1858 to German immigrant parents and after studying at Harvard and Strasburg he became a leading neurologist in New York, and in 1905 wrote the first American book on paediatric neurology. He lived on into the penicillin era and died in 1944. Tay-Sachs disease is characteristically commoner among