While the gonococcus is not transmissible through heredity it carries with it serious infective risks to the offspring. Fully 80%, and some authorities declare practically all of the blindness of the new born is caused by the gonococcus. CHAPTER VIII OTHER TRANSMISSIBLE DISEASES AND PAUPERISM _When authorities prohibit marriage for the unfit, they have in mind the probable fruits of such marriage. Women suffering from the diseases mentioned in this chapter give birth to children mentally and physically inferior, likely to sink into pauperism and certain to be in some way a burden upon society. If physicians were free to instruct parents how to prevent conception, the reproduction of their kind by defective and diseased parents living outside of institutions would be eliminated as a social problem._ INSANITY _DR. S. ADOLPHUS KNOPF IN THE SURVEY FOR NOVEMBER, 1916_ That insanity, idiocy, epilepsy and alcoholic predisposition are often transmitted from parent to child is now universally admitted and corroborated by every-day experience and by an abundance of statistics. Countless are the millions of dollars expended for the maintenance of these mentally unfit. The state of New York alone spends $2,000,000 annually for the care of its insane. Whether sterilization of these individuals would be the best remedy is a question still open for discussion. The constitutionality of the procedure is doubted by some of our legal authorities. Segregation is resorted to in the meantime with more or less rigor according to state laws. Every year, however, many of the individuals who had been committed to institutions for the treatment of mental disorders are discharged as cured. They are allowed to procreate their kind. Would it not be an economic saving if at least the individuals whose intelligence has been restored were instructed in the prevention of bringing into the world children who are most likely to be mentally tainted and to become a burden to the community? Of approximately every 500 persons in the United States in 1910, there was one an inmate of an insane asylum. The exact figures expressed in a recent report (Hill, Joseph A. Report on the Insane in the United States, Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce) that in a typical community of 200,000 persons, equally divided as to sex, 208 of the males and 200 of the females would be found in the insane asylums. In the course of a year 72 males and 60 females would be admitted to the asylums. In 1880 the total of inmates in insane asylums in the United States included 20,695 males and 20,307 females. In 1910, thirty years later, the number of male inmates had increased to 98,695 and the number of female inmates to 80,096. The excess of men among admissions in 1910 indicated a still further increase in the proportion, namely, 128 males to 100 females.