The First International Eugenics Congress / by Edgar Schuster.

  • Schuster, Edgar.
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The First International Eugenics Congress / by Edgar Schuster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    per cent, more to brain disease due to the same cause. When parental syphilis is transmitted to the offspring it causes death in the majority of cases either before or shortly after birth, but in spite of this it can now be demonstrated that in many cases idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness and sometimes general paralysis result. Thus from a eugenic point of view the disease is one of greatest importance. The neuropathic inheritance forms the subject of a research of very great value which is being conducted by Dr. Mott in the London County Asylums. A record is being obtained, and is stored on the card system, of all those inmates who have or have had relatives in the asylums. The number already reaches over 3,000. Seven hundred and fifty of these have at present brothers or sisters, fathers or mothers, sons or daughters in the asylums. This is, in itself, “ a strong argu¬ ment in favour of the importance of heredity as a cause of insanity, for it cannot be supposed that if we took 20,000 people from the 4,522,961 inhabitants of London for some random cause we should find 3*5 per cent, of them so closely related, as parents and offspring, brothers and sisters.” From these statistics many questions of importance may be studied with advantage. They show, for instance, that when an insane parent has insane offspring, the latter usually develop the disease at a much earlier period in their lives than the former, or to speak more generally, since the same phenomenon is shown when collateral relationships are considered, that when insanity appears in a stock it appears earlier in the lives of the younger generation than of the older. This process is of eugenic value, since through it the unsound elements are more likely to be weeded out and the degenerate stock from which they spring either ended or mended. It is also of importance in prognosis, for it shows that after the age of 25 there is a greatly decreasing liability of the offspring of insane parents to become insane. Some facts which may fail to emerge from statistical tabulation are shown by a careful study of individual pedigrees, and the card system inaugurated by Dr. Mott has formed a good starting point from which such pedigrees may be collected.