Handbook for speakers / issued by the Joint Committee on Voluntary Sterilization.

Date:
[1934?]
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Handbook for speakers / issued by the Joint Committee on Voluntary Sterilization. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    21/40 (page 16)
    Speakers should bê extremely careful to avoid stating that certifiable mental defectives are abnormally fertile. The point is 4Ìealt with in the Brock Report, para. 29. Nothing need be added to this paragraph except perhaps the remark that whereas it is almost certainly untrue to say that the fertility of defectives is abnormally high, it is probably perfectly true to say that the fertility of the families in which high grade defectives are born is abnor¬ mally high. This fact is conceded in a particular instance in para. 29 above quoted, at the end of which the statement occurs that there is evidence from Nottingham, Liverpool and London that the families from which defectives come are larger than the average families in the same locality. A large proportion of high grade primary aments come from the Social Problem Group, to be referred to later, the fertility of which is abnormally high. INHERITANCE OF MENTAL DISORDERS. (2) Reference has already been made to the fact that advo¬ cates of sterilization are disproportionately influenced by the prob¬ lem of mental defectiveness. Speakers must not forget that of insanity. According to the Report of the Board of Control for 1932, there were in England and Wales, 141,626 persons in mental hospitals certified as insane. In certain types of insanity, recovery may take place sometimes after but a short attack. Thus in 1932, 22,271 patients were directly admitted to mental hospitals. Of these, 79% were first admissions and 21% (over 4,000 cases) were re-admissions. The re-admission of a patient to a mental hospital clearly implies that that patient had pre¬ viously been discharged either as recovered or relieved. During the period of his freedom there is clearly nothing to prevent him from having children. The subject of the inheritance of mental disorder is dealt with in Chapter 3 of the Brock Report, pages 22-28. From this it will be seen (para. 38) that (i) manic depressive insanity and (ii) schizophrenia (both terms are defined on page 77 of the Brock Report), are the most strongly inherited forms of mental disorder. (i) According to statistical enquiries carried out in Germany by Rüdin and Hoffman, it was found that when, on average, one parent was manic depressive, one-third of the offspring will be manic depressive, while another sixth of the children will show milder disorders of mood ; whereas if both parents are manic ■depressive, two-thirds of the children will be manic depressive and the remaining third will show disorders of mood not amounting to a certifiable insanity. No estimates of the average frequency of manic depressive insanity have been made in England and Wales. In Bavaria, however, the frequency is 4 per thousand <or .4 per cent, of the general population. Manic depressive i6