Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    359/534 (page 343)
    ENDOCRINES AND HEREDITARY DEFECTIVENESS 343 The stigmata of hereditary syphilis are in large part due to thyroid dys¬ trophy, and further, he believes that: Mongolism is a dystrophy of endo¬ crine origin produced by syphilis. Concerning the matter of inherited defectiveness. Sajous thinks that There is thus a solid foundation for my belief that what in reality a mentally defective child inherits from his parents and ancestry is; (1) a tendency to defective physiological nutrition and development of his cerebral neurons; (2) inability to break down adequately various endogenous toxics, capable of awakening active psychical disorders; and (3) that both these morbid conditions are traceable back to the degenerative disorders caused in the ductless glands of parents or ancestors by the diseases and intoxications known to lead to the genesis of mentally defective offspring. Briefly, the main underlying cause of defective mentality in both parent and offspring is inherited deficient activity of the ductless glands. Under these conditions a pregnant defective fails to supply her fetus with the ductless gland secretions it requires. If the father is also a defective we know that the product of conception, when developed, will prove to be a defective. As to the pituitary, it was found to be overactive during pregnancy by Compte, Launois and Mulon, and others. Swale Vincent states, in fact, that it may enlarge to two or three times its normal size. The thyroid is so active also that its enlargement is often noticeable—108 times in 133 cases of pregnancy studied by Lang. If deficiency of thyroid is present convulsions occur, but these may be arrested by administering thyroid gland. Disorders of the pituitary also give rise to psychosis. As stated by Cushing, referring to his cases, and quite in accord with my own obser¬ vations, One form or another of psychic irregularities have manifested themselves in the larger number of patients. One authority thinks that the thymus is so important an organ in this connection that it may be said to stand, in respect to idiocy and dementia praecox, as the thyroid does to myxedema and cretinism. So evident is this connection that Bourneville found the thymus absent in twenty-eight idiotic children examined post mortem, while the organ was found normal in sixty-one children of normal mentality, who died of various diseases. Sajous believes that many of our mental and nervous defectives are functional defectives—not organic defectives; and he further states the case as follows: The thousands of purely functional defectives which the country contains, as we have seen, are not, judging from personal cases, the children of parents in whom in most in¬ stances, clearly defined stigmata can be discerned. This means that any infant may become a defective unless its development is closely watched by the attending physician. At the present time the evil trend is discovered too late to save the child's mind. Question 3. Do you think it possible that certain forms of backwardness may be due to disturbances of internal secretions, rather than directly the result of defect in the germ-plasm?