Volume 1

Health lectures for the people.

Date:
1883-1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health lectures for the people. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    508/896 (page 44)
    the general outcome of the investigation appears to be that the offspring of healthy cousins of a healthy stock is not more liable to degeneration than that of unrelated parents; but that where there is a family history of constitutional disease of any kind, there is a strong tendency in the children of cousins to degenera- tion. The objection to the marriage of blood relations does not rise from the bare fact of their relationship, but has its ground in the fear of their having similar vitiations in their constitution which in their children are prone to become intensified. If we task our memories, and try to remember how many perfectly healthy families we have known—families without a history of consumption, gout, rheumatism, affections of the nervous system, &c.—I fear the number we can estimate will be very small; and if we take into account the tendency of such diseases to become intensified in the children of cousins, I think you will agree with me that consanguineous marriage involves a risk which it is not well to incur. Looking back on my own experience, I have very rarely met with an instance in which the children of cousins were in physical or mental condition up to the level of their parents ; and I have known many instances in which there was a very well marked falling off, or an intensification of family disease. I think it is in conformity with the experience of most physicians that the nervous system is the one most liable to suffer; and when we take into account the multiform functions of the nervous system, it may be almost assumed that it, of all the systems, is the one most likely to suffer first. This is a com- plex subject, and I will not press it further. I will only reiterate that the children of cousins are handicapped by a greater liability to disease than the offspring of unrelated parents, and that such marriages are, as a rule, not to be encouraged. There is one other delicate point I must touch on. I am often asked by anxious parents whether it is advisable to allow their children to marry into families in which nervous disease is known to exist. Of course, as an abstract proposition, there is but one answer to this question—that it is not advisable; but in this work-a-day world it is not often that we can base our action on