How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern ScienceFisher, Irving
Science
How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science
Fisher, Irving
Hygiene
Suppose now that a normal or "strong-minded" person, if we may use that
term as distinct from feeble-minded, marries a feeble-minded person.
Assuming that the "strong-minded" person is a "thoroughbred" all of the
children will be apparently normal. None will be feeble-minded.
"Strong-mindedness" is dominant over weak-mindedness. Yet all these
children that seem to be perfectly normal lack something in their
bodies. This deficiency is simply covered up but can crop out in later
generations. If two of these hybrids between the weak-minded and the
strong-minded marry each other, one-quarter of the children will be
feeble-minded, one-quarter thoroughbred strong-minded and the remaining
half, though apparently strong-minded, will carry the taint in them just
as their parents did. They are half-breeds. On the other hand, if two
feeble-minded people marry, all of the children will be feeble-minded.
Certainly we can and ought to forbid and prevent such marriages.
But feeble-mindedness is a recessive quality, so that if the
feeble-minded marry only with normal individuals, the feeble-mindedness
does not blight the next generation, and if these apparently normal
children of such marriages take pains to marry only really normal
individuals, avoiding not only the feeble-minded but even those like
themselves who have feeble-mindedness on one side of their family tree,
there will be no feeble-mindedness cropping out in future generations.
[Sidenote: Instances of Eugenic Improvement]
But not all human abnormalities are recessive. Thus Huntington's chorea
is dominant, so that every child of the unfortunate victim of this
malady will contract it when it reaches the right age. Marriages of such
people should, therefore, never be allowed, even with normal
individuals.
But when we propose to restrict marriages or mating of those unfit to
marry, people are apt to say, "That is a dream. It can't be done." But
it can be done and it has been done. Every one has heard of the cretins
in Switzerland. They are a kind of idiot who are short in stature and
afflicted in all cases with goitre in the neck. Of course, many people
have goitre who are not cretins, but there is no cretin who has not
goitre. These cretins are peculiarly a feeble-minded people. They are
common still in many towns of Switzerland; they are loathsome objects,
helpless as children, with silly smiles, unable to take care of
themselves in even the simplest toilet ways, and have to be looked after
like domestic animals, or even more closely.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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