Eugenics and child welfare / by Sir John Alexander Cockburn.

  • Cockburn, John Alexander, Sir, 1850-
Date:
[1910?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Eugenics and child welfare / by Sir John Alexander Cockburn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    4/10 (page 258)
    While, then, I am willing to admit that the time is near at hand, if it has not already arrived, when an attempt should be made—chiefly by educating public opinion and creating new ideals—very cautiously to supplement (not substitute be it noticed) natural by artificial selection, I have no fear for natural selection and of its power to lift man upward. .That inexorable process is very well capable of taking care of itself. Upon it we must place our chief reliance, not only to maintain our present efficiency, but to advance us in the future, as it has advanced us in the past. Its operation is far less hindered than we are apt to think. Here and there perhaps we may be temporarily checking its sway, but so long as life lasts on this earth, it will in its own tragic w-ay continue to carry on its beneficent work of racial adaptation ; and we may rest assured this natural selection will be performed with infinitely greater wisdom than any selection which the wisest of men can make. 23, Wimp ole Street, London, W. From J. Lionel Tayler, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. London University Extension Lecturer in Sociology; Author of “ Aspects of Social Evolution^ What I personally feel to be the one safe method of inquiry into problems of eugenics and child welfare is that which studies structure and function side by side. This method has been practised by medical men and physiologists for the last hundred or more years, and there must be much danger in investigating the psychological aspect apart from the structural, morphological one, or vice versa. No one will question the advance which has been made in the knowledge of disease as a result of the increased study of post-mortem evidence ; nor the benefit which has followed from the surgical observa¬ tion of disease, the result of the advances in operative surgery. And, in like manner, our most valuable and certain conclusions on states of feeble-mindedness and idiocy have been obtained by noting that certain bodily characteristics are associated with certain mental ones (as, for instance, oblique eyes and mongoloid imbecility). In eugenics surely no other means of study can be regarded as satisfactory, for methods not based upon the observed relation of structure and function are necessarily far too speculative to be safe. Take as an example such a simple question as that of precocity in