Heredity and eugenics in relation to insanity / by F.W. Mott.

  • Frederick Walker Mott
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Heredity and eugenics in relation to insanity / by F.W. Mott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    (Fig. 10.) It would have been a national calamity had the former not been allowed to propagate; to cut off the lines of propagation in the latter would have been a national benefit. The popular expression, “ He comes from a good stock or a bad stock,” then, is the result of experience and quite scientific according to the laws of ancestral inheritance, yet now and then even from an apparently unknown or even bad stock a great man arises. Are we to say that because a parent is insane that therefore the children must necessarily be insane or useless to the race? God forbid ! The parents of some of the most eminent men became insane and genius with insanity frequently occurs in the same stock indicative of a variation from the normal average. The great point in any scientific investigation is not to try and prove some¬ thing, and to avoid any propagandist tendency; thus the question of alcohol and insanity is an illustration in point. The Council of Fifty in Massachu¬ setts investigated the number of patients admitted to asylums in which there was an alcoholic history; it was then suggested that they might investigate the number of total abstainers, it was found that they were as numerous. The scientific way to approach this question is to carefuly investigate the pedigrees of patients admitted, selected not because they show a large number of members of the ancestral stocks as being degenerate or insane, but selected because a complete family history can be obtained for three generations. This has been most successfully done by Dr. Hill Wilson White, formerly at the Manor Asylum. The pedigrees he has obtained show con¬ clusively that we must judge the right of a patient to propagate who has had an attack of insanity by a full consideration of his pedigree. Certain pedigrees which I have are of interest in relation to the question of alcohol; they are numerically insufficient to draw any conclusions, all we can say is they are indicative of a devitalisation of the germ when chronic poisoning occurs in successive generations. (Figs. 7, 14.) Statistics Relating to 3,118 Relatives They show the following facts :— 1. In the insane offspring of insane parents, daughters are much more numerous than sons. 2. Amongst insane members of the same family (brothers and sisters) sisters are more numerous than brothers. This may be correlated with the fact that more women are in asylums than men. There are several reasons for this : general paralysis, which is a fatal disease, is three times more frequent in men than in women; the recoveries in women do not bear the same proportion as in men. Now, why should women be more liable to become insane than men ? I will briefly summarize the causes which, in my opinion, are operative :— 1. The physiological emergencies connected with reproduction, i.e., the
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