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.

    18/32 (page 18)
    by Dr. Wilson White, showing the result of marriage of a nearly sound stock in which the temperament was, generally speaking, of the sanguine type; there was only one member insane at 55; she was unmarried; her four sisters, who were all married, had some healthy, grown-up children. The brother himself, perfectly sane and healthy, married a woman de¬ scended from stocks in one of which there were many members suffering with epilepsy (E.); indeed, her father and her grandfather suffered with it. On the maternal side there was suicide (S.) of an aunt and insanity of a grandfather; most of the members of this stock were of a melancholy, brooding temperament. The result of the mating of these two neuropathic stocks is shown. There were nine children, of which three, marked with deep, black-rimmed circles, suffered with some form of neurosis, a male congenital imbecile, a healthy male who has five healthy children, a child who died in early life of convulsions, the patient’s mother who became insane at the age of 40, a female who became insane at the age of 20, two females also suffered with some form of neurosis, lastly, a male who died in early infancy. The next generation shows the result of mating this unsound stock with an almost healthy, sound stock. There are not as many unsound members as in the last generation, and we observe that the four members that became insane at 19, 25, 30, and 20, all had their first attack at a much earlier age than their mother, one of these committed suicide and two were found dead; this pedigree illustrates well the signal tendency to the occurrence of antedating. The sound members of the stock apparently inherited their temperament from the father’s side, and the one member that is married has quite healthy children; this looks as if the unsound elements of this degenerate stock had been cleared out by segregation of the unsound germinal determinants, causing intensification of the disease and occurrence of the onset at an early age, thus preventing propagation. Fig. 5.—This pedigree shows the result of marriage of first cousins, in