The same position has been taken by Rush,[94] the pioneer American alienist; by Maudsley,[95] by Krafft-Ebing,[96] by Meynert, by Mercier, by Féré,[97] and others. Morel,[98] the chief accepted apostle of the doctrine of degeneracy, remarked, nearly at the same time as Moreau, that “heredity does not mean the very disorder of the parents transmitted to the children with the identical mental and physical symptoms observed in the progenitors, but means transmission of organic disposition from parents to children. Alienists have, perhaps, more frequent occasion than others for observing not merely this hereditary transmission, but likewise various transformations which occur in the descendants. They are aware that simple neuropathy (nervous tendency) of the parents may produce in the children an organic disposition resulting in mania or melancholia, nervous affections which in turn may produce more serious degeneracy and terminate in the idiocy or imbecility of those who form the last link in the chain of hereditary transmission.”
What is true of the organism as a whole is true of the cells forming its organs. It should be remembered that while cell life is altruistic or subordinated to the life of the organ, through the law of economy of growth, recognised by Aristotle, and through it to the life of the organism as a whole, altruism is not complete enough to prevent entirely a struggle for existence on the part of the cells or the individual organs. With rise in evolution this struggle decreases, to increase with the opposite procedure of degeneracy. From it results the phenomenon of arrested and excessive development.
As Dareste has shown (and the fact has been corroborated by Spitzka[99]), embryologists can imitate natural malformation of the nerve centres by artificial methods. By wounding the embryonic and vascular areas of the chick’s germ with a cataract needle, malformations are induced, varying in intensity and character with the earliness of the injury and its precise extent. More delicate injuries produce less monstrous development. Partial varnishing or irregular heating of the egg-shell, in particular, results in anomalies comparable to microcephaly (little head) and cerebral asymmetry. This latter fact (showing the constancy of the injurious effect of so apparently slight an impression as the partial varnishing of a structure not connected with the embryo at all directly) suggests the line of research to be followed in determining the source of the maternal and other impressions acting on the germ. What delicate problems are to be solved in this connection may be inferred from the fact that eggs subjected to the vibration and shocks of a railroad journey are checked in development for several days, or permanently arrested. A more delicate molecular shock during the maturation of the ovum, during its fertilisation, or finally during embryonic stages of the more complex, and therefore more readily disturbed and distorted human germ, accounts for the disastrous effect of insanity, emotion, or other mental or physical shock of the parent on the offspring. The cause of the majority of cerebral deformities exists in the germ prior to the appearance of the separate organs of the body. Artificial deformities produce analogous results because they imitate original germ defects, either by mechanical removal, or by some other interference with a special part of the germ. Early involvement of the germ is shown by the fact that the somatic malformations of the hereditary forms of insanity often involve the body elsewhere than in the nervous axis. The stigmata of heredity—defective development of the uro-genital system, deformities of the face and skull, irregular development of the teeth, misshapen ears and limbs—owe their grave significance to this fact. Like deformities of the brain, these anomalies are also more marked and constant with the lower forms of the hereditarily based systematised perversions of the mind than the higher. It is easy from these results to understand how far and how the nervous system has its part in the disorders of general development. It can be easily understood how the individuals who present most deformities are equally those who suffer from most decided disorders of the nervous system.
These morbid manifestations of heredity occur in certain categories, either local as to organs or structures, or affecting the body as a whole. These categories Moreau (de Tours) lucidly sums up as: First, absence of conception; second, retardation of conception; third, imperfect conception; fourth, incomplete products (monstrosities); fifth, products whose mental, moral, and physical constitution is imperfect; sixth, products specially exposed to nervous disorders in order of frequency as follows—epilepsy, imbecility or idiocy, deaf-mutism, insanity, cerebral paralysis, and other cerebral disorders; seventh, lymphatic products; eighth, products which die in infancy in a greater proportion than sound infants under like conditions; ninth, products which, although they escape the stress of infancy, are less adapted than others to resist disease and death.
The explanation of these morbid manifestations lies in the very foundations of embryology. Bearing in mind the principles of individuation pointed out by Spencer, it is easily understood how reversal of this principle would produce greater and greater destruction of the complex functions, resultant on increased reproductive power of cells (whose environment is not suited to such reproductions) and thus lead to such a struggle for existence as to produce sterility (from interdestruction of the ovum cells, or the cells forming the spermatozoon). This condition is further increased by the operation of two biologic principles. The first relates to the cells or organs forming an organism. The second, as Von Baer has shown, deals with the relation of the organs to each other.
Vertebrate embryos of a common type, at their origin, assume successively a number of common forms before definitely differentiating. Dareste points out that supernumerary organs do exist in these common forms at one phase of embryonic life. This community of embryonic types and this last fact explain repetition of teratologic types or monstrosities in vertebrates. This community of origin, moreover, indicates that a higher vertebrate embryo contains in essence the organs and potentialities of lower vertebrates, and that under the influence of heredity or accidental defect an organ belonging to another species may develop, or an organ constant in a species may be lacking in an individual, without the necessity of explaining the immediate effects by distant atavism. Some anomalies found among degenerates recall types less elevated than man, and very distant from him, even his possible Lemurian precursor.
It is obvious from the principles already demonstrated that the secondary effects of infectious disorders and injuries are reproduced in various types in the offspring. The malformations of the limbs experimentally demonstrated to be due to ancestral infection by Charin and Gley, and to injury by Dupuy, noticeably occur in men. Moor has observed supernumerary fingers in an imbecile girl; her grandfather and one uncle are polydactylous and insane. F. S. Coolidge has had under observation a case which excellently depicts these deformities in men. Kiernan[100] reports the case of a man whose grandfather and father had been prophets of the Lord, as shown by the fact that on one side of the body they had six toes and six fingers, and the two sides of the body were unequal, the six-fingered one being smaller than the other. This father and grandfather were highly regarded in a secluded vale in Norway as religious teachers and for their power to cure disease by charm. The father had ten children, of whom three were born dead and six died in infancy. Kiernan’s patient was the only survivor of this family. During boyhood he experienced various persecutions, some by unseen agencies, some on the part of the villagers, who towards the end of his father’s life also persecuted the father. These persecutions seem to have been withdrawal by the peasants of their belief in the father’s ability to charm sickness out of cattle, evidently due to growing popular intelligence. This was regarded by the father as the result of persecution by the devil, who was desirous of trying him as Job was tried. It was revealed to him that his son should likewise suffer persecution, which would also be the work of the devil. The son heard unseen persons, who pointed him out in school as the son of the sham wizard. In consequence he was avoided by all his schoolmates except the members of one family who still retained their belief in the father’s supernatural powers. Into this family the son married; then, pressed by his unseen persecutors, he came to the United States. Here he worked at his trade as a carpenter, and had no return of any persecutory delusions, although he still believed he was a prophet. On admission to the insane hospital, twenty years after his arrival in the United States, he was found to have such a decidedly asymmetrical body that suspicions of general hemiatrophy were excited, but the condition was found to be congenital. The hand and foot of the seemingly atrophic side had six fingers and toes. The man had been sent to the insane hospital in consequence of an altercation with a neighbour who was clearly in the wrong; but both being arrested, the patient’s amour propre was aroused and he declared his prophetship, which led to his trial and commitment as a lunatic. His wife, who applied for his discharge, was also a paranoiac. They had had ten children, of whom three were still living at the ages of six, eight, and ten. Two of these were six-toed and six-fingered unilaterally, and one of them, a boy, had the peculiar general asymmetry of the father. The third child was seemingly normal.
The experimental results of Charin and Gley, on the degeneration produced in offspring by ancestral microbic infection, tend to show that not merely are the extremities affected, but in certain cases the whole organism, along lines laid down by Moreau’s categories. This is demonstrated by study of the degeneracy stigmata of phthisical families. Alex. James, Ricochon,[101] C. E. Paddock,[102] and others have shown that (in addition to the ordinary stigmata) the biologic stigmata of degeneracy (such as plural and quickly repeated births) are frequent among phthisical families. The same phenomena often occur in families whose scions are attacked with diabetes, obesity, articular rheumatism, cancer and gout. De Giovanni[103] finds that particular nervous states exist in those predisposed to tuberculosis, whom he divides into erethists (restless), torpids, and energetics. There is a diminutive heart, whose right ventricle has comparatively exaggerated dimensions, while the arteries have lessened calibre.
A family illustrating excellently the transmutation of morbid heredity is one followed through five generations by Kiernan.[104] A farmer lived twenty miles distant from his nearest neighbour, whose only child he married. The daughter had led a lonely life till her courtship at the age of 28 by the farmer, then three years younger. The farmer married her for $300, after having impregnated her. He then found lead on his farm and went to a city. A stock-company bought his farm and launched him into the stock market, where he made money more as a cunning tool than an adventurer. He became a high liver, gouty and dyspeptic, and died with symptoms of gouty kidney at 70. The couple had five children. The eldest, a son, became a “Napoleon of Finance,” but, inheriting his father’s cunning, died wealthy and within the pale of the law. He married a society woman, the last scion of an old family. The second child, a daughter, was club-footed and early suffered from gouty tophi. She married a society man of old family who had cleft palate. The third child, a daughter, had congenital squint. She married a man who suffered from migraine of a periodical type. The fourth child, a daughter, was normal. She married a thirty-year-old active business man, in whom ataxia developed a year after marriage. The fifth child, a son, was ataxic at eighteen. The children of the “Napoleon of Finance” and the society woman were an imbecile son, a nymphomaniac, a hysteric, a female epileptic who had a double uterus, and a son who wrote verses and was a society man. The cleft-palated society man and club-footed woman had triplets born dead and a squinting, migrainous son who, left penniless by his parents, married his cousin the nymphomaniac daughter of the “Napoleon of Finance,” after being detected in an intrigue with her. The migrainous man and squinting daughter of the farmer stockbroker had a sexually inverted masculine daughter, a daughter subject to periodical bleeding at the nose irrespective of menstruation, as well as chorea during childhood, a normal daughter, a deaf-mute phthisical son, a daughter with cloacal formation of the perineum, an ameliac son, a cyclopian daughter (with one central eye) born dead, and, finally, a normal son. The sexual invert married the versifier son of the “Napoleon of Finance.” The progeny of the normal daughter of the farmer stockbroker and the ataxic husband were a dead-born, sarcomatous son, a gouty son, twin boys paralysed in infancy, twin girls normal, a normal son, and a son ataxic at fourteen. The progeny of the nymphomaniac daughter and her strabismic, migrainous cousin were a ne’er-do-well, a periodical lunatic, a dipsomaniac daughter who died of cancer of the stomach, deformed triplets who died at birth, an epileptic imbecile son, a hermaphrodite, a prostitute, a double monster born dead, a normal daughter, and a paranoiac son. The ne’er-do-well married his nose-bleeding cousin. The gouty son of the farmer’s normal daughter married the hysteric daughter of the “Napoleon of Finance.” They had a son born with such general asymmetry as to seem hemiatrophic, a prostitute, dead triplets, a male sexual invert, a colour-blind daughter, and a normal son. The colour-blind daughter married the paranoiac grandson of the “Napoleon of Finance.” The progeny of the sexual invert and the versifier, who were soon divorced, were a daughter with periodical nymphomania, who had some artistic and literary ability, and a son who died of gastric cancer. The scions of the ne’er-do-well and his nose-bleeding cousin were a moral imbecile, a “bleeder,” a stammering daughter who had an uvular deformity, a deaf-mute with undescended testicle, dead-born triplets, an infantile paralytic son, and dead-born quadruplets. The progeny of the paranoiac and his colour-blind cousin were an exophthalmic daughter, an epileptic with undescended testicle, a cleft-palated imbecile with a cloaca, dead-born quadruplets, an idiot boy, and a “bleeder.”
Doutrebente reports the following family history: First generation: Father intelligent, became melancholic, and died insane. Mother nervous and emotional. Second generation: Ten children; three died in childhood, seven reach maturity as follows: Daughter A, melancholiac; daughter B, insane at twenty; daughter C, imbecile; daughter D, a suicide; son E, imbecile; son F, melancholic; son G, a melancholic. Third generation: A has ten children; five die in childhood, one is deformed, one has fits of insanity, one is eccentric and extravagant, two are intelligent and marry, but are childless. B leaves no issue. C has one child, a deformed imbecile. D has three children; one is an imbecile, one dies of apoplexy at twenty-three, and the third is an artist described as “extravagant.” E has two children; one dies insane, the other disappears and is supposed to have committed suicide. F is childless. G has one child, who is imbecile.[105]