"The Jukes" : a study in crime, pauperism, disease and heredity : also further studies of criminals / by R.L. Dugdale ; with an introduction by Elisha Harris.

  • Dugdale, R. L. (Richard Louis), 1841-1883.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: "The Jukes" : a study in crime, pauperism, disease and heredity : also further studies of criminals / by R.L. Dugdale ; with an introduction by Elisha Harris. 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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    tree, including nearly 100 persons, the Corresponding Secretary urged me to push the inquiry further. For that purpose a return to the county was decided upon, and a further search instituted. The facts in hand, however, both suggested and necessitated a modification of the current statistical method of studying social phenomena by comple- menting it with a parallel study of individual cases reaching into causation. Even when the figures of such statistics are reliable, a great deal too much confidence has been placed on the supposed exactness of their conclusions, which, after all, rests on the theory of averages in which unforeseen and possible mistakes are eliminated by opposite errors becoming compensative. Statistics cumulate facts which have some prominent feature in common into categories that only display their static conditions or their relative proportions to other facts. Its reasoning on these is largely inferential. To be made complete it must be complemented by a parallel study of individual careers, tracing, link by link, the essential and the accidental elements of social move- ment which result in the sequence of social phenomena, the distribution of social growth and decay, and the tendency and direction of social difierentiation. To socio-statics must be allied socio-dynamics. Among the notable objections of pure statistics in the present connection is the danger of mistaking coincidences for correlations and the grouping of causes which are not distributive. Heat at one degree warms, at another withers, at another devastates, and the three degrees produce effects which cannot be reduced to an average. It may group identical effects, as for instance murder, which may be the result of diverse causes or of the concurrence of various groups of causes. It collates similar facts which, operating at differences of time, place, or circumstance, produce diverse effects not classifiable under the same head. It loses, in reducing its matter to an average, a maximum or a minimum, points of initial divergence, which, with slight deflection at first, produce opposite results when followed through successive removes to their culmination. Lastly, it does not deal adequately with complex con- tributive or distributive conditions which modify both causes and effects. In the study of the pathology of social disorders, many of them resting, as they do, solely upon organic disease of the body or mind, and therefore, requiring a critical exploring and analysis of constitu- tional habits, the above recited discriminations are absolutely necessary and had to be provided for. By a modification of the original schedule prepared by the Corresponding Secretary — a modification not of the original matter, but one affecting the form, adding the element of time and carefully recording the order of events — it was easily adapted to the objective point of the present inquiry, the study of the sequence of phenomena as set forth in criminal careers, to discover if there is a