Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The intermarriage of relatives and its consequences. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
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!['• jmv .r li ■ showing that medical men believe that it unquestionably does lead to degeneracy. And, although English physiolo- . gists are, as a rule, reluctant to place on record the results of their own enquiries, they do not hesitate to reproduce the I inferences of others. They refer their readers, for example, ; to the Clinical Lectures of Trousseau, who treats at con- siderable length “ des funestes influences cles unions consanguines sur la ptropagation de I'espfoe,” and who “dwells especially on the prevalence of deaf-mutism in the offspring of such later on. They also refer, and seemingly with tacit approval, to Devay's Hygiene de Famille, in which he “ charges upon marriages between relatives of the same stock, by the sole ' fact of the identity of blood, the production of a specific cause of organic degeneration, fatal to the propagation of the species.” Dr. Shuttleworth writes: “It is doubtless the case that morbid heredity, and especially mental morbid heredity, is likely to be intensified in the offspring of cousins.” Sir J. Crichton Browne goes much farther when he asserts that “ even healthy temperaments, when common to both (cousin) parents, often come out in the children as decided cachexiae”—that is, disordered states or habits of body ; Dr. Sir Arthur Mitchell, Deputy Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland, arranges as follow the conclusions to which he has been led :— “1°. That consanguinity in parentage tends to injure the offspring. That this injury assumes various forms. That it may show itself in diminished viability at birth; in feeble constitu- tions increasing the risk of danger from the invasion of strumous [glandular or scrofulous] disease in after-life; in bodily defects and malformations ; in deprivation or impairment of the senses, especially those of hearing and sight; and, more frequently than in any other way, in errors and disturbances of the nervous system, as in chorea [St. Vitus’ dance], paralysis, imbecility, idiocy, and moral and intellectual insanity. Sterility is another | result of consanguinity in marriage. “ II0. That when the children seem to escape, the injury may shew itself in the grandchildren; so that there may be given to the offspring, by the kinship of the parents, a potential defect which may became actual in their children, and thenceforward i perhaps, appear as an hereditary disease. “ IIP. That, as regards mental disease, unions between blood-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24761710_0005.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
