An examination of some recent studies of the inheritance factor in insanity / by David Heron.

  • Heron, David.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An examination of some recent studies of the inheritance factor in insanity / by David Heron. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    AN EXAMINATION OF SOME RECENT STUDIES OF THE INHERITANCE FACTOR IN INSANITY By DAVID HERON, D.Sc* In the last few years a number of studies of the inheritance factor in insanity have been published in America, Germany and England. The value of investigation of such atopic cannot be overestimated. We are quite certain that the prevalence of insanity is not falling; many of us indeed believe that the statistics suffice to demonstrate that it is substantially increasing, and that we can attribute this increase not in the first place to the intenser strain of modern life, but to the greater power of modern treatment to check or temporarily cure attack, and thus allow wider possibility of reproduction to members of affected stocks. Indeed the problem seems closely associated with an essential difficulty of modern civilisation, the greater protection of physically and mentally degenerate stocks unaccompanied by any adequate limitation of their thereby increased power of procreation; the inheritance factor thus tends to aid the relatively greater survival of the socially unfit. The studies we have referred to would be of great importance from this aspect of eugenics if (i) the data were collected without conscious or unconscious bias, and (ii) the inferences drawn from them followed logically from the data thus collected. Unfortunately it is not only in the interpretation of statistics that adequate training is required. It is equally important that in the actual collection of them we should proceed, not only free from the bias which arises from the hurried acceptance of dogmatic theories of heredity, but what is often still more needful, free from the bias which is almost certain to waylay our progress, if we have not initially considered with trained insight the fallacies which may result from our method of recording or even tabulating our material. The day of the amateur in science is gone ; no one now pays any attention to men who propound elaborate atomic theories or stellar hypotheses, without having had preliminary training in physical or astronomical science. There are still, however, some who appear willing to accept the statement of statistical data or the infei’ences drawn from those