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
A great majority, however, having no such interested or capable relatives,
become at once a direct burden upon society. These divide according to
temperament into two groups. Those who are phlegmatic, sluggish, indolent,
simply lie down and would starve to death, if some one did not help them.
When they come to the attention of our charitable organizations, they are
picked up and sent to the almshouse, if they cannot be made to work. The
other type is of the nervous, excitable, irritable kind who try to make a
living, and not being able to do it by a fair day’s work and honest wages,
attempt to succeed through dishonest methods. “Fraud is the force of weak
natures.” These become the criminal type. The kind of criminality into
which they fall seems to depend largely upon their environment. If they
are associated with vicious but intelligent people, they become the dupes
for carrying out any of the hazardous schemes that their more intelligent
associates plan for them. Because of their stupidity, they are very apt to
be caught quickly and sent to the reformatory or prison. If they are
girls, one of the easiest things for them to fall into is a life of
prostitution, because they have natural instincts with no power of control
and no intelligence to understand the wiles and schemes of the white
slaver, the cadet, or the individual seducer. All this, we say, is what is
to be expected. These are the people of good outward appearance, but of
low intelligence, who pass through school without acquiring any
efficiency, then go out into the world and must inevitably fall into some
such life as we have pictured.
Let us now turn to our public institutions. These have not yet been
sufficiently investigated, nor have we adequate statistics to show what
percentage of their inmates is actually feeble-minded. But even casual
observation of our almshouse population shows the majority to be of
decidedly low mentality, while careful tests would undoubtedly increase
this percentage very materially.
In our insane hospitals may also be found a group of people whom the
physicians will tell you are only partially demented. The fact is they
properly belong in an institution for feeble-minded, rather than in one
for the insane, and have gotten into the latter because an unenlightened
public does not recognize the difference between a person who has lost his
mind and one who never had one.
In regard to criminality, we now have enough studies to make us certain
that at least 25 per cent of this class is feeble-minded. One hundred
admissions to the Rahway Reformatory, taken in order of admission, show at
least 26 per cent of them distinctly feeble-minded, with the certainty
that the percentage would be much higher if we included the border-line
cases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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