Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and ResultsTalbot, Eugene S. (Eugene Solomon)
History
Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results
Talbot, Eugene S. (Eugene Solomon)
Abnormalities, Human; Degeneration; Heredity, Human
In sixteen cases the zygomatic processes were unequal and very prominent.
There were fourteen other asymmetries of the face. Three heads were
Mongoloid (one Irish-Celt, one Swiss, and one Scandinavian). There are
Mongoloid race types in the regions where all three come from. Sixteen
were epignathic and eleven prognathic. In one there was arrested
development of the lower jaw, and in four arrested development of the face
bones. The nose was abnormal in six. There were sixteen brachycephalic and
thirteen mesaticephalic skulls. There were no dolichocephalic skulls.
There were three with oxycephalic skulls, of whom one was a Celt, one a
German, and one a Scandinavian. There were eighteen dome-type skulls, of
whom seven were Irish-Celts, five Celtic-American, one English
Anglo-Saxon, one American Anglo-Saxon, and one German-American. There were
four tectocephalic skulls, of whom one was an Irish-Celt, one an
Anglo-Saxon American, and one a Scandinavian. There were three
platycephalic skulls, of whom two were Celts and one a Scandinavian. There
was a plagiocephalic German and a stenocephalic Celt. One skull had a
protuberance at the bregma. Twelve occiputs were flattened, and in four of
these there was no tubercle; eighteen had an enormously developed
occipital protuberance. The percentage of deformities of the jaws was
large. Twenty-nine had defective ears. Normal ears were present only in a
member of a family which had furnished one mother and two sisters to the
institution.
The direct hereditary history of prostitutes is excellently illustrated in
Marie Duplessis, idealised by Alexandre Dumas in _La Dame aux Camélias_.
Her paternal grandmother, who was half prostitute, half beggar, gave birth
to a son by a country priest. This son was a country Don Juan, a peddler
by trade. The maternal great-grandmother was a nymphomaniac, whose son
married a woman of loose morals, by whom a daughter was born. This
daughter married a peddler, and their child was Marie. She had the
confidence-operator tendencies of many of her class. She died childless,
early in life, from consumption.[255] With their ancestry, habits,
perverse instincts, prostitutes cannot be cured or reformed by the
enforcement of municipal ordinances. Though those of criminal and
congenital type be taken from their surroundings and placed where they can
earn an honest livelihood, they soon go back, voluntarily, to their old
mode of life.
An allied class, belonging to a still blacker phase of biology, are the
sexual perverts. The congenital form associated with the stigmata of
degeneracy, as already shown, is an expression of the defective line
whence the victim has sprung. The congenital types are, like the similar
types of the prostitute, victims of inherited defects. The sexual pervert
may be divided into precisely the same classes as other criminals. The
congenital type often links degenerate lunatics, epileptics, &c., with a
born criminal class.
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