Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results

by Eugene S. Talbot

Tobacco is the most common, while alcohol and opium contend for second place both as to use and as to deleterious effects. Alcohol has been repeatedly charged with being the factor in degeneracy. Statistics of the first half of the present century seem to justify the conclusion that it is apparently the most potent factor, yet these statistics as a rule confound coincidence and cause, or effect and cause, or the vicious circles thereby resulting, to a remarkable degree. There are but few races in which alcohol has not been used and abused. The American Indians[152] had tizwein, chica, and pulque long ere Columbus; the Tartars and Russians, bouza, kvas, and kumyss; the South Sea Islanders ava and toddy (from the cocoanut); the Tunisians, laymi. The vast majority of the races of mankind have used alcoholic beverages. Each was called by a local name and not by a loan word, a most demonstrable evidence of local origin.

Even the social insects (bees and ants) at times indulge in fruit ferments. The claim, therefore, that alcohol is the product of high civilisation, hence of recent origin, and hence peculiarly destructive, is untenable. That excess in alcohol frequently occurs in degenerate stocks is, however, undeniable. But as Krafft-Ebing, Kiernan, Spitzka and others have shown, intolerance of alcohol is an expression of degeneracy. The person intolerant of alcohol becomes either a total abstainer because of a personal idiosyncrasy (like that which forbids certain people to eat shell-fish lest nettle-rash occur), or because of parsimony, or for both reasons combined. Such total abstainers leave degenerate offspring in which degeneracy assumes the type of excess in alcohol as well as even lower phases. The race tests of the deteriorating influence of alcohol are practically valueless, nor are statistics concerning alcoholism in the ancestry of degenerates of much more use. The enormous amount of idiocy, for example, in the Scandinavian countries, charged by Huss, Langdon Down and others to alcoholism in the parents, has been, by the most recent researches, cut down by Roof to less than 7 per cent. Insane hospital statistics vary to a like degree. Bad faith, however, is out of the question in these statistics. Lack of analytic skill, and that dangerous unscientific, canting, philanthropic tendency which rebels at statistics unfavourable to preconceived sociologic theories, explain these discrepancies. The ignoring of all but the alcoholic factor produces also great elements of error. Kiernan[153] cites twenty-three cases in which degenerate stocks were charged to alcoholic parentage, but which on analysis proved to be due to a degenerative factor in the parents of which alcoholism was merely an expression. Nearly all the offspring born after inebriety were prematurely born, defective, epileptic, hysteric, insane, idiots or criminals. Some few were healthy, apart from their intolerance of alcohol. In eighteen cases both father and mother were alcoholists. The fathers in four of these cases had been temperate, industrious, and affectionate ere being sunstruck. Following this came periods of irritability, excessive drinking and spendthriftiness. The mothers had remained for some years after the fathers’ breakdown free from the use of alcohol, but were nervously exhausted from the strain. One became depressed during pregnancy, was given gin for the depression, and the habit persisted after the delivery. In the three other cases painful menses developed during the nervous exhaustion. The popular prescription for these, gin, was given, with the result of producing inebriety. In ten cases skull injury to the father had like results on both mother and father. In two cases the mother became a victim of painful menstruation after a railroad accident; gin drinking, to relieve this, followed and became a habit. The father’s nervous system broke down under the strain and both became inebriates. In two other cases nervous exhaustion from typhoid and typhus fever produced the same outcome in inebriety on the part of the father and mother. In the remaining cases the inebriety was an expression of nerve exhaustion after various protracted infections. The alcoholism in these cases was clearly an expression of the factors of race deterioration producing degeneracy, and not its cause.

The influence of alcohol must therefore first be studied on the individual to determine its value and method of action as a cause of race deterioration. Careful medical researches have shown that alcohol produces a nervous state, closely resembling that induced by the contagions and infections, often accompanied with mental disturbance (delirium tremens and acute types of insanity). The acute nervous state to which the term alcoholism was applied by Magnus Huss has all the essential characteristics of the nervous state due to the contagions and infections. There is, however, a greater tendency to impotence and sterility in the alcohol nervous state than in the others, and consequently a lesser influence on race deterioration. The condition, moreover, has a tendency to set into action degenerative tendencies latent in the liver and kidneys. This action of alcohol on the liver and kidneys so interferes with their functions as to produce the effect already described as resulting in the contagions and infections from their toxins. Alcohol exerts a similarly deteriorating influence on the antitoxin-forming organs (especially on the testicles, ovaries and their appendages), to that already described as exerted by the toxins of the contagions and infections. To the direct toxic effects of alcohol are therefore added results of imperfect liver and kidney action and defective strengthening powers from deficient antitoxin secretion. Like all toxic agents, alcohol interferes with the functions of the eye and ear nerves. Special weakness thus created is transmissible to the offspring. The chronic type of alcoholism may well be compared in its effect with chronic contagions. There is, however, less tendency to infection with the microbes forming pus. There is a greater tendency to deteriorating action on the nervous system. There is in chronic alcoholism, as in syphilis, special tendency to that formation of connective tissue which destroys organs. The chronic mental disorders of chronic alcoholism resemble those of tuberculosis except that the capricious state and exaltation are less frequent than the suspicional tendency which is deeper, and takes the direction of delusions of poisoning and insane jealousy. The last are due to the deteriorating influence of alcohol on the generative organs. Alcohol may limit its action to the central nervous system, and thus produce hereditary losses of power. It causes changes in the peripheral nerves which in the offspring find expression in spinal cord and brain disorder through extension of the morbid process. But for its deteriorating effects on the ovaries and testicles, alcohol would be a most serious social danger. Through its action on the generative organs it tends to prevent the survival of the unfit, rather than to develop degenerates.

Opium seems to be the Charybdis on which the human bark strikes when escaping from the Scylla of alcohol. Its abuse as a narcotic is much older, even among the English-speaking races, than is generally suspected. Murrell, over ten years ago, demonstrated that the inhabitants of the fens of Lincolnshire had long employed opium as a prophylactic against malaria. The ratio of insanity in these regions proved to be very great. The same conditions obtained in certain malarial regions of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the use of strong infusions of poppy was common. The statistics of Rush[154] as to opium-caused insanity in Pennsylvania, indicate that the percentage of American opium abuses at the beginning of the nineteenth century was very great. The drug differs in two serious respects from alcohol. It is nearer in chemical composition to nerve tissue, and the tendency to its use may be transmitted by the mother directly to the fœtus. This, as Bureau and Ringer have shown, receives through the placenta from its opium-using mother a certain amount of morphine. In consequence, the child in the first month of infancy must be nourished on the milk of an opium-using woman, or given opium in some other way lest it perish. To this fact Calkins[155] was the first to call attention. His results were corroborated later by Hubbard; Kiernan, of Chicago[156]; Erlenmeyer, of Berlin; F. B. Earle, of Chicago; Mattison, of Brooklyn; Hughes, of St. Louis; and others. Amabile, of New York, showed that not only were the children of opium-using mothers born with tendency to the opium habit, but that the mothers aborted frequently with twins, and that the children who survived were very liable to convulsions. Independently of this factor the mental state produced by opium habit resembles in many respects that of the lunatic, in that the victim of opium is as unable to distinguish between his wishes and the facts, and therefore often utters what appear to be sheer lies. Hence he is totally unreliable and has taken a step in mental and moral degeneracy that, by the ordinary laws of heredity, must greatly increase, unless corrected by healthy atavism and training in the next generation. Opium is a more dangerous factor of degeneracy than alcohol, since the opium user must be in a continuous state of intoxication to carry on his usual avocation, while abstinence is perfectly compatible with proper work on the part of the drunkard. The opium habit is increased by the peculiar propaganda carried on by the habitués who justify their position by urging the use of opium for any ailment, however minimal. Opium, like alcohol, causes nervous exhaustion similar to, but greater than, that of the contagions and infections. From the affinity of opium to nerve tissue, from its tendency to stimulate the heart, thus causing increased blood supply to the brain; from its action on the bowels and the increased resultant work of the liver, this nervous state is much intensified. Opium does not have as great tendencies to interfere with the structure of the ovary and testicles as alcohol, hence the greater danger of the opium habitué’s children surviving. Opium, when smoked, stimulates the reproductive apparatus, and thus would greatly increase the number of degenerates due to this habit but for the defects due to the inheritance of the habit and their consequences.

FIG. 1.—ANTE-CHRISTIAN IRISH PIPES.

FIG. 2.—ANTE-COLUMBIAN PIPES FROM SCULPTURE
AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON.