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
children of insane parentage, who are perverse from the start? Will he say
that the perverseness is only a 'badness' which should be whipped out of
the child? But that has generally been thoroughly tried before the
physician is consulted. Heterodox I know it is, but observed facts compel
me to be heterodox with Prichard and Esquirol and Ray, with Morel and
Griesinger and Maudsley, and I know not how many others, in recognising in
some cases a condition of inherent defect born in the individual, and not
a result of education--a condition which writers have recognised under
various names as hereditary mental disorder, insane diathesis, insane
temperament."
The Guiteau trial so stimulated studies of degeneracy that two experts for
the prosecution, A. McL. Hamilton[48] and H. M. Stearns,[49] later changed
their views as to degeneracy, while C. L. Dana, a strong supporter of the
Gray school in 1881, subsequently made valuable contributions to the
literature of the degeneracy stigmata. The position then taken by Spitzka
and Kiernan as to the cerebral basis of degeneracy was in 1882 supported
by H. Howard,[50] of Montreal; Workman,[51] of Toronto; Kerlin,[52] of
Pennsylvania; Osler,[53] of Baltimore; and C. K. Mills,[54] of
Philadelphia.
It was during 1881, moreover, that Jacobi made extensive studies of
degeneracy in royalty and aristocracy,[55] as earlier had Ireland.[56]
From the time of Itard degenerate phenomena in idiots had been traced to
cerebral mal-development. Kerlin[57] pointed out that "epileptic change"
in them was marked by moral alteration similar in explosive characters to
that so frequently observed in criminals. In England students of idiocy
like Clouston, Shuttleworth, Beach, Ireland, Langdon Down, and others, had
early brought the recognition of its inter-relations with insanity, crime
and neuroses into strong relief. To the studies of Bruce Thomson,
Maudsley, and Nicolson, Tyndall[58] gave strong support from the actual
experience of a governor of a great British prison, who found that the
prisoners in his charge might be divided into three distinct classes: the
first class consisted of persons who ought never to have been in prison;
external accident and not internal taint had brought them within the grasp
of the law, and what had happened to them might happen to most of us; they
were essentially men of sound moral stamina, though wearing the prison
garb. Then came the largest class, formed of individuals possessing no
strong bias, moral or immoral, plastic to the touch of circumstances which
would mould them into either good or evil members of society. Thirdly,
came a class, happily not a large one, whom no kindness could conciliate
and no discipline tame. They were sent into the world labelled
"incorrigible," wickedness being stamped, as it were, upon their
organisation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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