The intermarriage of relatives and its consequences.

  • C. J. M.
Date:
[1890?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The intermarriage of relatives and its consequences. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    constrained to surrender personal prejudice to professional conviction. Thus Dr. Charles West {Mother's Manual of Children’s Diseases, 1885) says: “First among the causes of sickly infancy and premature death, may be mentioned the marriage of near relations.” Dr. Shuttleworth—for many years Medical Superintendent of the Royal Albert Asylum,. at Lancaster—writes: “There exists in the public mind, as one sees evidenced by remarks in Society and other journals, a misgiving as to the propriety of such marriages;, and in medical literature also we find a disposition to attribute many evils, both physical and mental, to the intermarriage of relatives.” The same learned and experienced physician, writing in the British Medical Journal, July 6th, 1889 (p. 53), says : “ Subsequent experience leads me to think, even more seriously than before, of the undesirability of marriages' between cousins . . . Quite lately I admitted into this institution four imbecile brothers and sisters out of a family of six, and in this case no other cause than the consanguinity of parents has yet been ascertained.” The “misgiving” re- ferred to as seeking relief in the correspondence columns of Society and other journals, is no more and no less than the expression of a dread, graven on the minds of interested correspondents by the revelation of such melancholy results' in others; while the fact that “ medical literature” has the smooth current of its philanthropy so continuously ruffled by the repetition of the same question, proves, beyond a doubt, that the medical mind too is incessantly haunted by the same unbidden and unwelcome apprehension. 1 may add that those issues of the Medical Journal’ and Lancet are rare in which reference to this question does not recur; and that the treatment which those references receive—at the hands of writers whose professional reputation and fortune are at stake—is either wholly condemnatory of intermarriage, or sc transparently evasive as to be tantamount to unequivocal condemnation. The editor of the Jjancet writes (January 28th, 1888) :— “ Few questions are more frequently asked by the readers o. this journal than the important and interesting one, ‘ Dc consanguineous marriages lead to disease in the offspring?’