Mendelism and the problem of mental defect / by David Heron.

  • Heron, David.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Mendelism and the problem of mental defect / 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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    it is hopeless to attempt any denial of the statement, that when an insane child comes from one normal and one insane parent, the normal parent must have had somewhere an insane ancestor! For the rest we must leave to the individual parent to decide whether it is better that all his offspring should be tainted with latent insanity or that 25 per cent, should be normal, 50 per cent, tainted with latent insanity, and 25 per cent, actually insane. All such families are in our opinion eugenically inexpedient; all marriages of those of insane stock, whether themselves insane or carrying latent insanity, are highly undesirable. Above all, we repudiate in the name of Eugenics any sanction for the enfeeblement of strong stocks by mating them with weak stocks on the basis of a theory which, even if true, declares that all the offspring will carry latent defect. The strong should mate with strength. No test of normality before the event is possible, and the normal parent who marries the insane on the advice that ‘ strength may marry weakness ’ will only, if he has insane children, be told by these theorists : ‘ Ah, yes, but you must have had an insane ancestor somewhere.’ Nothing is more astonishing than the amount of approval that this cacogenic doctrine ^ has received in this country. Mr. Havelock Ellis writes: ^ ‘ These relationships of feeble-mindedness have been clearly brought out in an important investigation by Davenport and Weeks {Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, November 1911), who have for the first time succeeded in obtaining a large number of really thorough and precise pedigrees of such cases.’ The morning papers at the time of the Eugenics Congress repeated broadcast similar statements: ‘ Dr. Davenport, Director of the American Eugenics Record Office, pointed out two years ago that two feeble- minded parents never have any but feeble-minded children ’ {Daily Chronicle, July 27, 1912); and we are further told in the same place of ‘ the entirely splendid work of the American Eugenics Record Office ’, where it is shown that ‘ the inheritance of epilepsy, when studied by the Mendelian method, can be stated exactly in terms of the Mendelian law ’. It does, indeed, as we shall see, need to be studied ‘ by the Mendelian method ’! 1 Ellis and Punnett while not directly approving of the ‘ cacogenic doctrine ’ have expressed their approval of the work in this field of Davenport’s Recoi'd Office. 2 The Task of Social Hygiene, p. 36. On p. 198 Ellis writes : ‘ The pedigrees of the defective classes (especially the feebleminded and epileptic) are now being accurately worked out as by Godden [sic, Goddard], at Vineland, New Jersey, and Davenport in New York.’