Elisha Harris,[35] of New York, among 233 convicts found 54 to belong to families in which insanity, epilepsy, and other neuroses existed. Eighty-three per cent. belonged to a criminal, pauper, or inebriate stock, and were, therefore, hereditarily or congenitally affected. Nearly 76 per cent. of their number hence proved habitual criminals. According to Harris, crime, pauperism, and insanity revert into each other, so that insanity in the parent produces crime or pauperism in the offspring, or, vice versâ, crime or pauperism in the parent produces disease or insanity in the offspring. Campagne, Broca, G. Wilson, and others about the same time made similar researches.
The American sociologist, Samuel Royce, after a careful study of American and European defective classes,[36] found that observation of the hereditary nature of pauperism which congenitally reverts into insanity, disease or crime, leaves no doubt but that pauperism is one of the worst forms of race deterioration, and that the paralysis of the human will and its energies is but the result of a fearful dissolution in progress.
Extensive researches made by Charles S. Hoyt,[37] of the New York State Board of Charities (1874), into the origin of the defective classes of that state, show that the pauper, hysteric, epileptic, prostitute, criminal, born-blind, deaf-mute, paranoiac, recurrent lunatic and idiot were buds of the same tree of degenerate heredity. E. C. Spitzka,[38] basing his researches on the principles of Morel as expanded and critically applied by Meynert,[39] reached essentially the same results as also did Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, Grille, Kerlin, Axel Key, Magnan, Foville, Bjornstrom, Amadei, Schüle, Nicolson,[40] Tonnini, Tamburini, Verga, Tamassia, Kowalevsky, and it may be said the German Psychiatrical Society (which, by accepting a conception of the distortion of mental faculties otherwise seemingly high, based on brain deformity rather than disease, accepted the degeneracy doctrine of to-day).
For several decades, moreover, the stigmata of degeneracy have appeared in French, German, Austrian, Russian, Italian, and Scandinavian court reports as evidence of hereditary defects.
As often happens in science—
“Thought by thought is piled till some great truth
Is loosened and the nations echo round.”
Wherefore about this period (1870-78) appeared the first volume of the epoch-making work of Cesare Lombroso,[41] who, erroneously credited with being the apostle of the modern doctrine of degeneracy, has admittedly done more to stimulate research than any other investigator. This work exerted an influence at first in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the Scandinavian countries, while on the English-speaking countries, despite the apparently fertile soil prepared for it, its influence was seemingly slight. Under the degradation produced in many American charitable and correctional institutions by corruption, naturally resultant on a civil war, science therein was at a decided discount between 1861 and 1881. A school arose which, defying the individualistic rule of English common law underlying the institutions of the United States, pandered to mob-law and theologic prejudice by denying certain well-ascertained facts in human degeneracy. This school, represented at the Guiteau trial by the experts for the prosecution, denied heredity and that moral defect could result from physical abnormality. This school, however, was by no means representative of American psychiatry or sociology. Rush, Brigham, James MacDonald, Gait, McFarland, W. W. Godding, Ray, C. H. Hughes, Kerlin, Patterson, Wilbur, Fisher, J. H. McBride, C. H. Nichols, C. A. Folsom, Cowles, and others accepted Morel’s principles. Spitzka,[42] long ere the trial, pointed out that criminals displayed the stigmata of Morel, and that the more intellectual types of insanity were based on brain deformity rather than disease.
Benedikt,[43] of Vienna, in 1879 stated that “criminals generally have nothing analogous to monomaniacs. They tend to develop distinct peculiarities of organisation and psychic features, and these peculiarities are the product of their social condition.” J. G. Kiernan,[44] reviewing his work, remarked that any one who had at all examined the question would be convinced that between the true criminal type, the imbecile and the paranoiac (primäre verrückt) the psychological relations and their anatomical bases are intimate and close. Had Benedikt examined the insane and criminals, not for convolutional aberrations alone, but also for heterotopias, &c., he would never have written the sentence just quoted.
W. W. Godding,[45] commenting on the evidence of J. P. Gray,[46] the leader of the American school that denies degeneracy, feelingly remarked that “the disordered mind does not cease to be a unit although the observed manifestations of its insanity may seem to be confined in some cases to the emotion; in others to the affection; and in still others to the intellectual powers. We cannot deny that the old masters were as keen-sighted observers as ourselves. I dislike to hear drunkenness called dipsomania, as I so often do; but I do not therefore say that dipsomania is only drunkenness. It might improve my standing with the legal fraternity if I should pronounce kleptomania only another name for stealing, but my personal observations convince me that the insane have sometimes a disposition to steal, which is a direct result of their disease, and for which they are no more accountable than the puerperal maniac is for her oaths.
“And now, after all these years of careful research, and our asylum reports[47] rendered bulky with long tables prepared with so much care, involving inquiry on the origin of the disease not alone in the direct family line, but in the collateral branches also; just when the medical profession has come to believe that if one fact in medical science be better established than another, it is that insanity is hereditary, and we undertake in the present case to look up hereditary predisposition, and the family disposition likewise, we are met with the withering conundrum, ‘Can a man inherit insanity from his uncle?’ and we are told that there is no such thing as hereditary insanity. Yes, gentlemen, I understand you; the tendency to the disease is inherited. And so in the strict use of language there is no such thing as insane delusion; but we know that language is seldom used with scientific exactness, and no one is at a loss to understand what we mean when we say that Jones is full of insane delusions, insanity being hereditary in his family. Yes, and if Jones should marry an insane woman, the chances are good that Jones’s son will turn out crazy, no matter how carefully he may be brought up under the direction of the most eminent psychist, for that little germ which you call ‘a tendency’—so minute that it will elude your most careful scrutiny with scalpel and microscope—is a fixed fact, and will prove more potent than all theories. Not born there; develops. Ah, how is it that science shows us that syphilis and small-pox and tubercle are born in the offspring, that the infant comes into the world with spina bifida, idiotic, hydrocephalic, acephalic, that the child is blind and mute and misshapen in his mother’s womb, but is never insane? Because, forsooth, we have seen fit to limit insanity to disease of the brain, and disease is not inherited. Is it possible that in all these years it has not been Dr. Gray’s lot as it has been mine to be consulted about those ‘queer’ children of insane parentage, who are perverse from the start? Will he say that the perverseness is only a ‘badness’ which should be whipped out of the child? But that has generally been thoroughly tried before the physician is consulted. Heterodox I know it is, but observed facts compel me to be heterodox with Prichard and Esquirol and Ray, with Morel and Griesinger and Maudsley, and I know not how many others, in recognising in some cases a condition of inherent defect born in the individual, and not a result of education—a condition which writers have recognised under various names as hereditary mental disorder, insane diathesis, insane temperament.”