Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The influence of heredity on idiocy / by Martin W. Barr. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
10/14 (page 8)
![eleven brothers and sisters died of spasms during den-31 tition. It will be seen by this that the neurosis running! through the family touches the third generation but I lightly, and intensifies itself in the fourth. Two family histories of my own patients (videgenealM ogical table No. III.) are interesting studies in heredi- J A. B., apathetic idiot. Huntingdon's chorea has ex-* isted in mother's family for many generations. Maternal grandmother choreic, maternal grandfather phthisical. ] Of this marriage there were born seven children ; the order of birth, ages, and sex unknown, with exception of mother of A. B. Three alive and married, and ex-;' tremely nervous. Have children said to be normal in every respect. The four deceased children, including mother, died of chorea. Paternal grandfater and grandmother both strong healthy, and lived to unusual old age. Their issue con- , sisted of nine children, sex, age and order of birth un- known. All healthy. T.ie mother of A. B. was always delicate, and three days after marriage was attacked by chorea, of which she died after twenty three years. She had eight chil- dren, the two oldest—male and female—said to be nor- mal. Both married and have healthy children. Third, female, deaf and dumb; fourth, male, imbecile ; fifth, A. B., female, idiot. Three children born after this, of whom nothing is known except that they died in early infancy of epilepsy, diarrhoea, and one was still-born. H. W., high-grade imbecile, eighth child, first born of twin in a family of fifteen, nine of whom are dead;; four from convulsions in infanc}-, two still-born, one from, scarlatina, and two, including patient, of meningitis. Of the six children living, five are said to be normal, and: one a shameless harlot, who is practically a paranoiac. Both father and mother came of pronounced neurotic f am ilies. Father peculiar, morose, intemperate, and died in his fifty-first year of apoplexy. His first cousin was an im- becile. Mother is considered very peculiar. Howe7 tells of three towns situated in close proximity to each other in which are a number of families where, both parents and children arc imbecile. He tells also where an indigent female idiot living in one town mar- 1 Causes of Idiocy, p. 78.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24761709_0012.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
