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
However, it would seem to be rather dangerous to base any very positive
hope on environment in the light of these charts, taken as a whole. There
are too many other possible explanations of the anomaly, _e.g._ these
cases may have been high-grade morons, who, to the untrained person, would
seem so nearly normal, that at this late day it would be impossible to
find any one who would remember their traits well enough to enable us to
classify them as morons.
We must not forget that, on Chart IX-e, we also have the daughter of
Justin taken into a good family and carefully brought up, but in spite of
all that, she proved to be feeble-minded. The same is probably true of
Deborah’s half brother.
We have claimed that criminality resulting from feeble-mindedness is
mainly a matter of environment, yet it must be acknowledged that there are
wide differences in temperament and that, while this one branch of the
Kallikak family was mentally defective, there was no strong tendency in it
towards that which our laws recognize as criminality. In other families
there is, without doubt, a much greater tendency to crime, so that the
lack of criminals in this particular case, far from detracting from our
argument, really strengthens it. It must be recognized that there is much
more liability of criminals resulting from mental defectiveness in certain
families than in others, probably because of difference in the strength of
some instincts.
This difference in temperament is perhaps nowhere better brought out than
in the grandparents of Deborah. The grandfather belonging to the Kallikak
family had the temperament and characteristics of that family, which,
while they did not lead him into positive criminality of high degree,
nevertheless did make him a bad man of a positive type, a drunkard, a sex
pervert, and all that goes to make up a bad character.
On the other hand, his wife and her family were simply stupid, with none
of the pronounced tendencies to evil that were shown in the Kallikak
family. They were not vicious, nor given over to bad practices of any
sort. But they were inefficient, without power to get on in the world, and
they transmitted these qualities to their descendants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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