A more recent study of hereditary degeneracy is that of the "Zero Family" in Switzerland.[[58]] Here the first degenerate was the product of two successive consanguineous marriages, both with a branch tainted with insanity. In spite of his bad ancestry he lived to the age of 106 years. He married an Italian woman of questionable antecedents, and was the father of a large family. Three hundred and ten of his descendants are mentioned, of whom many are still young. Of these 310, 74 died in early childhood, 55 are or were vagabonds, 58 were weak-minded or idiotic and 23 were criminals. Fifty-two were of illegitimate birth. Although some are counted in more than one category, the record is appalling. In this family however, the marriages were nearly all with foreign women, and the effect of consanguinity was only the intensification of the neurosis in the first two generations.
Dr. Bemiss found that 300 or 7.7 per cent of the offspring of consanguineous marriages were subject to scrofula.[[59]] This is a disease which is almost universally recognized as hereditary, and which we should therefore expect to find intensified by double heredity. But 7.7 per cent is obviously too high; otherwise most of the scrofulous must be the offspring of marriages of kindred. About one per cent of the children of my own correspondence cases were reported as scrofulous. And while the United States Census reports but 3.9 per cent of the blind as the offspring of consanguineous marriages, the percentage of the blind from scrofula is 6.1.[[60]] The blind from scrofula of consanguineous parentage were 2.8 per cent of all the blind of consanguineous parentage, while all the blind from scrofula were 1.8 per cent of all the blind. Consanguinity, then, seems appreciably to intensify scrofula, but there is no indication that scrofula is ever caused by parental consanguinity.
CHAPTER V
CONSANGUINITY AND MENTAL DEFECT
Idiocy, perhaps more than any other disease or defect, has long been connected in the popular mind with the marriage of cousins. This fact is not surprising when we consider that until very recent times idiots were looked upon with a kind of superstitious awe, and the affliction was supposed to be a curse of God. For this reason, when idiocy did follow consanguineous marriage as it sometimes would, it was believed to be the fit punishment of some violation of divine law. Insanity also frequently has been attributed to consanguineous marriage, but not so frequently as idiocy, since its occurrence later in life is not so obviously connected with pre-natal conditions.
The terminology of mental and nervous disorders has been so loosely applied that some definition may be necessary. By the term "idiocy," is meant a condition of undeveloped mentality. Idiocy exists in various degrees, from the complete absence of intellectual faculties to a condition of mere irresponsibility in which the subject is capable of self-help, and sometimes of self-support under the careful guidance of other. Under the generic term "idiot" may be included the "complete idiot," the imbecile, the "feeble-minded" and the "simpleton," all of whom suffer in a greater or less degree from arrested mental development.
Insanity, on the other hand, is a disease which destroys or clouds an intellect which has once been developed. It is true that certain conditions of idiocy and imbecility do resemble that phase of insanity known as dementia—a reversion to the original mental state of childhood—in reality a form of second childhood. But the states are not identical, although one may lapse into the other. One is defect, the other disease; the imbecile in the former being the counterpart of the dement in the latter, just as the moral imbecile is the analogue of the paranoiac.[[61]]