These findings, not on sick men, but on those who passed every test and were considered perfectly well, reveal an important cause of low vitality.
Among the young women who applied for admission to the Women's Army Corps, there was similar disability. Each year we lose many more persons from preventable and premature deaths than we lost in battle or from war injuries during the entire war.[33]
"Above are the fathers and mothers of our future generations. To our money lust we can attribute the following shameful conditions:
"Before the war, one American in 13 or 14 had either a sick mind or a defective one. Now one in ten has crumbled. Not all will be hospitalized. But doctors estimate that one American in 20 now alive will spend some time in a mental hospital before he dies. That means seven million Americans in mental hospitals—or headed there!
"We have today more sick and defective minds than there were soldiers killed in all our wars from the Revolution through World War II. More than half of all beds in all hospitals—whether equipped to handle them or not—are occupied by sick minds. Yet, for every sick mind in a hospital, there are 18 or 19 out of the hospital but who need psychiatric care. Every staff doctor in state hospitals has, on the average, 240 patients to care for. In the south central states, the average number of patients to each staff doctor is 346.
"The fact is that it is our youth which is cracking up. Out of every 1000 young men called up by the draft, 178 were rejected as mentally diseased or defective.
"Looking ahead, the psychiatrist foresees, only 20 years hence, some 16,500 senile insane and imbeciles pouring into the state hospitals every year."[34]
"Noah Webster, the lexicographer, must have been mistaken in defining the word civilization as a 'reclamation from a savage state as being cultured and refined.' He should have described it as a most horrible, shocking, and brutal state.
"'They must have been men because they killed each other and must have been civilized because they did it frightfully'—said Voltaire.
"Our ancestors, the savage aborigines, men of the Middle Ages, and even Nero, seem to us to have been barbarous. They were saints compared to our present brutal kind. They would have been shocked had they foreseen our present cruelty, in our modern, so-called civilized age.