Huntington’s Chorea

It is a pleasure to send Dr. Hayden's monograph on its way to as yet unknown but hopefully widespread destinations with all the valedictions a Foreword may contain. Since I met the author in Cape Town in 1978 I have been struck, on numerous occasions, by the fortuitous combination of an inquisitive mind, a creative drive, a sharp awareness of the historical and social setting of phenomena, and a solid discipline which his personality displays behind a good-natured laugh. If a tree is known by its fruits, both Dr Hayden's PhD thesis and the present monograph afford quite an insight into the auctor intellectualis. The amalgamation of the terrible mise ry behind scientifIc facts and the elegantly artistic presentation of this book will leave none of its readers unperturbed. It reminds me of Nietzsche's 'Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, und wir bewundern es so weil es gelassen verschmäht uns zu zerstören' (Beauty is but Horror's beginning, and we admire it because it resignedly spurns to destroy us). The book is a denial, a testimony against Juvenal's spurious 'Sternmata quid faciunt ... ' (of what value are pedigrees). For it is the very genetical prolongation of misery over the centuries that brought Huntington's chorea to South Africa, Australia and the USA from the shores of sea-faring seventeenth-century England and Holland.