Heredity and eugenics in relation to insanity / by F.W. Mott.

  • Mott, F. W. (Frederick Walker), 1853-1926.
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Heredity and eugenics in relation to insanity / by F.W. Mott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    religious beliefs, fanaticism, mysticism, spiritism, an unwholesome con¬ tempt for traditional custom, social usages, and morality, a vain spirit of spurious art and culture, a false self-loving vanity in the pursuit of a sentimental altruism, or by eccentricities of all kinds; such signs of degeneracy are often combined with talent and even genius, especially of the constructive imaginative order; but the brilliant intellectual qualities of a degenerate are invariably associated with either a lack of moral sense or of sound judgment and highest control. Time, chance, circumstances, and opportunities play an especially important part in moulding and determining the career of a neurotic stock; circumstances and environ¬ ment may favour one member and he rises on the tide of fortune to an eminent position, whereas another, unfortunate or less fortunate, but with a similar inborn temperament, dies in an asylum or commits suicide in despair. I have often found in the collecting of pedigrees the association of insanity and suicide in a stock preceded by, or associated with, the exist¬ ence of individuals possessing the melancholic, suspicious, brooding, self- centred, hypochondriacal temperament; and it is not uncommon for suicide of one or more members of the stock in successive generations to occur. Associated with these temperamental evidences of degeneracy of a stock may be chronic alcoholism, dipsomania, hysteria, hypochondriasis, exophthalmic goitre, neurasthenia, psychasthenia, migraine, petit mat, or neuroses of an epileptic character, often unrecognised because not mani¬ festing fits of the major form of the disease. In searching for the neuro¬ pathic tendency there are, therefore, many possibilities of missing the inborn factor of a neurosis or psychosis though a careful inquiry be made, even when aided by intelligent co-operation on the part of the friends. Some Illustrative Pedigrees Showing Various Manifestations and Results of the Neuropathic Taint. Fig. 3.—A. B., an alien Jew, aged 54, was admitted to an asylum for the first time suffering with involutional melancholia; he has a sister who has not been in an asylum, but, as events turned out, bore the latent seeds of insanity. The man is married to a nealthy woman who bore him a large family; the first five are quite healthy, then comes a congenital imbecile 3 Insane. Fig- 3