A woman with a tendency to alcoholism should under no circumstances be allowed to marry. In the cases, fortunately rare, in which the drink craving exists in women, marriage is even more undesirable than it is in the case of men similarly afflicted, for the female drunkard is in a position in which she can mishandle and neglect her children throughout the entire day. P. 258.
RASSENVERBESSERUNG. Translated from the Dutch of Dr. J. Rutgers. Second Edition. Dresden, 1911.
Pelman examined 709 of the 834 descendants of an alcoholic vagrant, named Ada Inke, who died in 1740. Among these were found 106 illegitimate children, 142 were vagrant beggars, 64 were charity dependents, 181 prostitutes, 96 were tried for various offenses, among these 7 were for murder. These descendants during 75 years cost the State 5,000,000 marks. P. 97.
August Forel, who for years was the psychiatrist at the head of a large insane asylum at Zurich, Switzerland, has this to say about the effects of narcotic poisons and alcohol in particular: “The offspring tainted with alcoholic blastophthoria suffer various bodily and physical anomalies, among which are dwarfism, rickets, a predisposition to tuberculosis and epilepsy, moral idiocy in general, a predisposition to crime and mental diseases, sexual perversions, loss of suckling in women, and many other misfortunes. But what is of much greater importance is the fact that acute and chronic alcoholic intoxication deteriorates the germinal protoplasm of the procreators.”
MICHAEL F. GUYER, Ph.D., Professor of Zoology, University of Wisconsin in “Being Well Born.”
In an investigation on the effects of parental alcoholism on the offspring, Sullivan (Journal of Mental Science, Vol. 45, 1899) gives some important figures. To avoid other complications he chose female drunkards in whom no other degenerative features were evident. He found that among these the percentage of abortions, still-births and deaths of infants before their third year was 55.8% as against 23.9% in sober mothers. In answer to the objection that this high percentage may be due merely to neglect, and not to impairment of the fetus by alcoholism, he points out the fact, based on the history of the successive births, that there was a progressive increase in the death-rate of offspring in proportion to the length of time the mother had been an inebriate. P. 169.
A TEXT BOOK OF OBSTETRICS. Barton Cooke Hirst, M.D., Professor of Obstetrics in the University of Penn.; Gynecologist to the Howard, the Orthopaedic and the Phil. Hospitals, etc. 7th Edition. W. B. Saunders Co., Phil, and London, 1912.
The effect of chronic diseases of the mother upon the fetus. Women affected with tuberculosis, cancer, or chronic malarial poisons may give birth to a succession of dead children. P. 353.
Fetal mortality exceeds that of any other period of life. For every four or five labors there is one abortion, and if to this number is added still-births the proportion of fetal deaths to living births is larger. P. 332.
THE DISEASES OF SOCIETY AND DEGENERACY. G. F. Lydston, M.D.