DIAGNOSIS DOWN SYNDROME PATTERN ETIOLOGY ANALYSIS NATURE ARCHITECTURE GOTHIC RUSKIN

 PATTERN RECOGNITION
 Character  Sign  Signal  Symptom  Syndrome  Style
Nature  Character 
Analysis  Synthesis
Idea

" ... I shall endeavour to give the reader an idea, at once broad and definite ... of the true nature of Gothic architecture (or a Medical Syndrome) ... that of universal Gothic (or Down Syndrome) (1)  ... The principal difficulty in doing this arises from the fact that every building of the Gothic ... differs in some important respect from every other (2) ... many include features which, if they occurred in other buildings, would not be considered Gothic at all ... difficult to make the abstraction perfectly intelligible because ... characters are made up of many mingled ideas ... consist only in their union (3) ... that is to say, pointed arches do not constitute Gothic, nor flying buttresses, nor grotesque sculptures ... but all or some of these ... and many other things ... when they come together so as to have life ... the definition proposed ... the idea which I suppose already to exist in the readers mind (4) ... we all have some notion of the meaning of the term Gothic  ... without being able to define it (5) ... that the Strasbourg Cathedral is Gothic and St. Peters is not ... having no clear notion of what is that they recognize in the one or miss in the other ... we have then, the Gothic character submitted to our analysis, just as the rough mineral is submitted to that of the chemist, entangled with many other foreign substances, itself perhaps in no place pure ... but nevertheless a thing a thing of definite and separate nature (6) ... the chemist defines the substance ... by two kinds of character; one external ... hardness, lustre ... (7) the other internal, the proportions and nature of its constituent atoms (8) ... (regarding Gothic) we must ask what is the Mental Expresson (9)  ... 

Hohn Ruskin (1819-1900) remains an intellectual force that persists beyond his times. He was an erratic student and suffered from bouts of mental illness and delirious visions.

(W. Wertelecki, M.D.) The above concepts apply to Medical Syndromology, Dysmorphology  and Clinical Medicine - instead of "Gothic" it can apply to Down Syndrome (DS).
 (1)  DS has been recogniezed for centuries before its association with extra chromosome 21 material was described; (2) DS persons are at least as variable as everybody else;  (3)  signs nor symptoms seen in DS are also are seen among others, what is characterisitc is their concurrence causing a "syndrome" (signs that "run" togehther); (4) experienced clinicians can better recognize DS if ttrained in grasping what is "normal" or "abnormal" combined with exposure to DS persons; (5) many DS features are sublte but nearly constant - e.g. mental subnormality, premature aging ...; (6) DS is a biologic entity, disorder or "disease" in terms of cause (etiology) and prognosis (natural history); (7) DS has a phenotype or material expression; (8) DS is associated with specific gene imbalances (genetic information or templates);  (9) characateristically, DS patients can be integrated into family life; (10) genetic analysis of DS patients can illuminate clues about the anatomic and mental features, elevated cancer risk, premature aging and Alzheimer deterioration and behavior characteristics of DS persons..