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
The nerve centres controlling nutrition, growth, repair, secretion, and
excretion are often as deeply affected as those checks constituting
morality. At the periods of physiologic stress these effects are
especially noticeable. Moral insanity, intellectual insanity, unequal
mental balance, hysteria, precocious sexuality, unconscious mendacity,
mental parasitism (the germ of pauperism), epilepsy, neuroses, and all
types of nutritive and constitutional defects result. The nutritional
defects may appear chiefly in the walls of the blood vessels and
lymphatics. While these are most common in the chronic infections and
contagions, they often occur in acute typhoid fever, scarlatina,
diphtheria, whooping-cough, &c. Proper blood supply and utilisation of
waste is thus prevented. Organs cannot perform their function, and are
predisposed to disease from disuse and from weakness of the
disease-fighting phagocytes and antitoxins. From this results irregularity
of organ function, which is hereditarily transmissible. The weakened
vessel walls yield to strain, and thus produce local stomach, bowel,
liver, gland, and kidney disorders. This organ weakness may alone be
transmitted to the offspring. The functions of the great glands (thyroid,
thymus, suprarenals, pituitary body, bone-marrow, testicles and ovaries)
which secrete principles necessary to the equal balance of nutrition are
perverted. The liver, in the acute but more particularly the chronic
contagions, paralysed in nerve tone, fails in its function of
poison-destroyer, as for the same reason the kidneys fail in their power
of ejecting hurtful waste. Through this interaction of perverted
nutrition, imperfect poison-destruction, and deficient waste ejection
result and continue the states of nervous exhaustion after the contagions
and infections. Thus nerve exhaustion with its suspicion, its capricious
hopefulness and gaiety, is practically continuous in tuberculosis,
syphilis, and leprosy.
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