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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    inheritance of the unfit in all classes of society. However, we do not know enough about human genetics to predict always the fittest and the unfittest. Some of the greatest men the world has seen have sprung from the most humble and unknown stocks. Eugenics, therefore, should aim at giving every individual that is worth preserving in every class a chance of survival. A living wage, enough to ensure a sanitary dwelling and a sufficiency of nourishing food for parents and family, should be possible for every labourer and artisan. For if the rich and the intel¬ lectuals will in a progressive manner restrict their birth-rate, natural selec¬ tion is deprived of its rights among these classes, and Eugenists can have no sympathy with such but rather with the masses of the people. The wealth of the nation depends upon labour, and labour demands a sufficiency to live and propagate under far more favourable conditions than now exist in our great cities, where the poorer the people and the more uncertain their wages the higher is the rent demanded for the miserable tenements in which they have to bring up a family. It is a fact, as Professor Karl Pearson keeps urging, that at the present time in Great Britain restriction of families is occurring in one-half or two-thirds of the people, including nearly all the best, while children are being freely born to the feeble-minded, the criminal, the pauper, the thriftless casual labourer, and other denizens of the one-roomed tenements of our great cities. The alien Jew and Irish Roman Catholic have large families as their religion prohibits restriction, perhaps unfairly in the case of the Irish, for the poorest classes of the population in some of our large cities are largely of Irish extraction. Profes¬ sor Pearson keeps warning us that 25% of our population, made up mainly of the above-mentioned poor types, is producing 50% of our children, and if this goes on must lead to degeneracy. If the better classes will not propagate they must pay for the propagation of the poorer classes, and natural selection, aided by human effort, must encourage the propagation of the fit and the cutting off the lines of inheritance of the unfit. In considering the subject of Heredity and Eugenics in relation to insanity, we have to ask ourselves what constitutes insanity at the present time. It is often extremely difficult to draw the line between sanity and insanity. It may, however, be asserted that a person is insane who, on account of disease or disordered function of the brain, can no longer feel, think or act in accordance with the customs and social usages of the com¬ munity in which he lives. An individual is judged to be sane or insane by his conduct, but behaviour by itself without consideration of the social environment is an insufficient criterion. Every case of insanity is a biological problem, the solution of which depends upon a knowledge of what a man was born with 11 nature ” and what has happened after birth “ nurture.” No child is born insane, though it may be born feeble¬ minded, either from actual organic disease or an inborn germinal cerebral deficiency. The former, being an acquired character, is not transmissible;