Sterilization for human betterment : a summary of results of 6,000 operations in California, 1909-1929 / by E.S. Gosney ... and Paul Popenoe.

  • Gosney, E. S. (Ezra Seymour), 1855-1942.
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Sterilization for human betterment : a summary of results of 6,000 operations in California, 1909-1929 / by E.S. Gosney ... and Paul Popenoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE PROBLEM eases as patients, is vastly larger than the 300,000 to be found there in any one year. Calculations show that it is actually something like four in each hundred of the population, or 4,800,000 of the citizens of the United States who, before they die, will be classified as insane. A century ago, or even much less, the patient who was seriously ill mentally was isolated and tied up and his disease was almost always aggra¬ vated by the treatment he received. In short, once committed to an institution, he was a hope¬ less case. There was little chance that he would return home to produce more children. The progress of medicine has made the lot of these sufferers less wretched. By good care and kind treatment, many of them, as noted above, make at least temporary recoveries; and the pol¬ icy of modern hospitals is to parole them, as soon as it is feasible to do so, back to their own homes and among their relatives. This means, if they are married, that they go back to their wives or husbands, as the case may be, and frequently it means that they have additional children. Their defective constitutions, in so far as these are due to heredity, are thus passed on to still more of their descendants. That these defects are already widely scattered through the germ plasm of the nation is indicated [5]