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
A gentleman very much interested in Eugenics visited Aosta, in Italy,
just outside of Switzerland, once in 1900 and again in 1910. In 1900 he
found many of these creatures among the beggars in the streets, in the
asylums, in the home, in the orphan asylum--everywhere he ran across
these awful apologies for human beings. But in 1910 he found only one!
What had happened? Simply that a few resolute intelligent reformers had
changed the entire situation. An isolation institution, or rather two
institutions, one for the men and the other for the women, were
established. In these the best care of the inmates was taken as long as
they lived, and they do not live long. But pains were taken to see that
by no possibility could marriage or mating of those people take place.
They forfeited any such rights in return for the care that they received
from the State.
Thus is it possible to apply the laws of heredity as laid down by Mendel
in a thoroughly practical way and to get results _immediately_ in one
short generation. It seems, and it is, a colossal task to change average
human nature one iota. Yet in the light of modern eugenics we could make
a new human race in a hundred years if only people in positions of power
and influence would wake up to the paramount importance of what eugenics
means. And this could be done quietly and simply without violence to
existing ideas of what is right and proper. It could be done by
segregation of the sexes for defectives, feeble-minded, idiots,
epileptics, insane, etc. By this kind of isolation we can save the
blood-stream of our race from a tremendous amount of needless
contamination.
And it is being done. The growing tendency to put defectives in
institutions, though originally with no such object, will reduce the
transmission of defects, especially when it is recognized that the sexes
must be separated and that the inmates should be kept at the institution
through the reproductive period of life.
[Sidenote: Educational Influence]
It is inconceivable that the average individual will deliberately and
consciously make his calculations regarding the character of possible
offspring before he allows himself to fall in love to the point of
desiring marriage. Yet unconsciously an educational influence on love
and on marriage selection has been operating through centuries. The
sick, the feeble-minded, the immoral, and members of their families,
have at all times been socially handicapped, and have always been the
first to be eliminated in marriage selection. And it is conceivable that
this already developed wisdom in mate-choosing can easily be augmented
by a further knowledge of heredity which is now available. It
unconsciously favorably modifies the individual taste.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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