“Brother Isaiah stepped to one side of his wooden platform on the Venice Beach yesterday. He placed a silver police whistle to his lips and blew. The piercing crescendo sent a shiver through the tense mass of humanity which stretched from the sand back to the ocean walk.” Similar miracles and cures were carried on by Mrs. Amy McPherson in San Diego, San Jose, and all along the Pacific coast. The self-impulse and the fear instinct, in their intensified forms, are the bane of deluded, neurotic humanity. CHAPTER XXVII NEUROSIS AND HEREDITY The following discussion in the form of questions and answers may prove of interest to the physician and to the intelligent layman. The discussion occurred in the course of correspondence. A friend of mine thought the subject of sufficient importance to have it brought to the attention of the cultured public. The questions are as follows: “Are not all neuropathic conditions the results of a morbid, unstable nervous organism, the basis of which lies in a faulty heredity? “Are not weak nerves the cause of hysterical, neurasthenic and neuropathic affections in general? “Is not all neurosis due to defective parent stock? “If the occasions for fear, as some psychopathologists claim, were more frequent in primitive times than now, then the cave men must have had more psychopathic affections than civilized man.” To these questions the following answers are given: Psychopathic diseases are not hereditary--they are _acquired_ characteristics, having their origin in the abnormal, hypertrophied growth of the fear instinct which is at the root of the primal impulse of self-preservation. This is proved by psychopathological studies of clinical cases; and it can be further demonstrated by experimental work in the laboratory even in the case of animals. “Weak nerves,” “a run down, exhausted nervous system,” whatever the terms may mean, may overlap psychopathic conditions, but the two are by no means equivalent, much less identical. Psychopathic, psychoneurotic states are not “weak nerves” or “fatigued nerves.” Above all, there is no need to obscure the matter and resort to the much abused, mystical and mystifying factor of heredity. It is easy to shift all blame on former generations, when, in most cases, the fault is close at hand, namely, a debased environment, a defective training, and a vicious education.