The right to marry / issued by the North Dakota Department of Public Health in cooperation with the United States Public Health Service.

Date:
[between 1920 and 1929?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The right to marry / issued by the North Dakota Department of Public Health in cooperation with the United States Public Health Service. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    3/12 page 1
    The Right to Marry URING the Revolutionary War a young Jersey- man of good family, whom we shall call Martin Kallikak (not his real name, but near enough to it for our purposes), joined one of the regi- ments recruited in New Jersey for the defense of the colonies. While his regiment was being trained to fight, Martin met a feeble-minded girl at one of the taverns frequented by the sol- diers and by her became the father of a feeble-minded child. At the close of the war he returned to his home and in due course of time married a girl of good family. Among the children, grandchildren and the later descendants of this marriage are numbered successful physicians, lawyers, edu- cators, merchants and land owners, in short, men and women prominent in every phase of social life; of the four hundred and ninety-six direct descendants of Martin Kallikak’s legiti- mate children, none are known to be mentally deficient. But what is the story of the illegitimate child? The feeble-minded illegitimate son, named by his mother Martin Kallikak, jr., but known locally as “Old Horror,” married a normal woman. They had ten children of whom two died in infancy; of the eight who survived, three were mentally normal, the other five were feeble-minded, two of the latter being sexually immoral and one epileptic as well. The oldest son, Millard, who was feeble-minded, married a feeble-minded woman, Althea Haight. All but one of their fifteen children who survived infancy were known to be feeble-minded. Millard’s oldest son, Justin, who was feeble- minded, alcoholic and sexually immoral, married Eunice Bar- rah, a normal woman of a feeble-minded family, and all but one of the five children who lived past infancy were feeble- minded. Their first daughter, Martha, a feeble-minded sex- ually immoral woman was the mother of a feeble-minded child Deborah, who was admitted to the Vineland Training School. The study of her family history revealed the story just told and, incidentally, revealed that, among the four £
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3