The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-MindednessGoddard, Henry Herbert
Science
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness
Goddard, Henry Herbert
Heredity, Human; Mental retardation; People with mental disabilities
Besides the mother of Deborah, Justin and Eunice had ten other children,
of whom six died in infancy. One of the daughters, Margaret, was taken by
a good family when a very small child. When she was about thirteen, she
visited her parents for a few weeks. While her mother was away at work,
her father, who was a drunken brute, committed incest with her. When the
fact became known in her adopted home, she was placed in the almshouse.
The child born there soon died, and she was again received into the family
where she formerly lived. The care with which she was surrounded prevented
her from becoming a vicious woman. Although of dull mentality, she was a
good and cheerful worker. When about thirty-five, she married a
respectable workingman but has had no children by him.
Another daughter, Abigail, feeble-minded, married a feeble-minded man by
whom she had two feeble-minded children, besides a third that died in
infancy. She later married a normal man.
The next child of Justin and Eunice was Beede, who is feeble-minded. He
married a girl who left him before their child was born. He lives at
present with a very low, immoral woman.
The youngest child of Justin and Eunice was a son, Gaston, feeble-minded
and a horse thief; he removed to a distant town where he married. He has
one child; mentality of both mother and child undetermined.
This is the ghastly story of the descendants of Martin Kallikak Sr., from
the nameless feeble-minded girl.
Although Martin himself paid no further attention to the girl nor her
child, society has had to pay the heavy price of all the evil he
engendered.
Martin Sr., on leaving the Revolutionary Army, straightened up and married
a respectable girl of good family, and through that union has come another
line of descendants of radically different character. These now number
four hundred and ninety-six in direct descent. All of them are normal
people. Three men only have been found among them who were somewhat
degenerate, but they were not defective. Two of these were alcoholic, and
the other sexually loose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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