Being Well-Born: An Introduction to Eugenics

by Michael F. Guyer

CHAPTER VIII

MENTAL AND NERVOUS DEFECTS

Some of the most important and serious problems which confront humanity to-day lie in the realm of mental and neural maladjustments. For human progress and social welfare are in last analysis based fundamentally on the results of normal reactions of human nervous systems. Any serious derangement of the latter may, and in certain cases must, lead to more or less disaster for the individual and disorder for society of which he is a unit. So appalling has the number of neuropathic subjects become in modern times that the matter may well cause even the most thoughtless citizen to pause and consider.

Prevalence of Insanity.—As to the prevalence of insanity, one learns from recent charts prepared by a member of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene that in 1910 we had more insane (187,454) in our institutions than there were students (184,712) in all our colleges and universities in the United States, or officers and enlisted men (142,695) in our combined United States army, navy and marine corps; further, the yearly cost ($32,804,450) of caring for these insane is greater than the annual cost of construction ($32,520,100) on such a stupendous undertaking as the Panama Canal. In New York over twenty per cent. of the revenues of the state go to support the insane. Doctor Lewellys F. Barker, President of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, says: “It is calculated that some 250,000 people in the United States are insane. One of every five men discharged from the United States army for disability is discharged because of insanity, 60 per cent. of the cases being dementia precox.”

Even in individual states with exceptionally large university populations we still find these outnumbered by those of the insane. Thus in Wisconsin by 1914 the state university had attained a population of about 4,700 students resident at the university during the regular school year, and of approximately 6,000 attending during some part of the year, but the number of insane under restraint in public institutions in the state June 20, 1912, was 6,851, with an additional 1,284 on parole. This does not include the insane in various private sanatoria, and moreover a considerable greater number of patients had been treated in these public institutions than were resident there June twentieth.

To make such comparisons complete one should, of course, know the average length of residence of students in college, and of insane patients in institutions. No accurate data on this point are at hand. The average period of residence in hospitals for the acutely insane is doubtless considerably shorter than the average period of attendance of students in college, while on the other hand the average period of residence of inmates in asylums for chronic insane is probably considerably longer. For example, the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane reports a total of 1,224 patients under treatment, but an average population at any one time of only 622 during the year 1911, and the Northern Hospital for the Insane, a total of 1,194, with a daily average of 613 during the same period. The combined thirty-four county asylums in Wisconsin, for chronic insane, had a total population of 5,384 during the year 1911, with a loss of 517, or approximately 10 per cent. During 1912 the figures for these same institutions run 5,758 and 742 respectively, or a loss of over 12.5 per cent. The conditions in other states are probably much the same.

In other representative states we find the number of insane in public institutions as follows: California, 7,909; Michigan, 7,703; Minnesota, 5,329; Pennsylvania, 16,992. Epileptics are estimated by alienists to be about equal in number to the insane, feeble-minded to be more numerous. The estimate that in the United States there are 300,000 feeble-minded is probably a minimal figure.

Imperfect Adjustments of the Brain Mechanism Often Inheritable.—The outside layer or “cortex” of the brain is the region in which the more complicated adjustments occur, especially such as pertain to human behavior, and inasmuch as this portion of the brain is extremely complex and delicate in its mechanism, it is peculiarly liable to derangements which, even when slight, may have far-reaching effects.

This brain-mechanism is as much a product of ancestry as is any other structure of the body, and it is obvious therefore that imperfect adjustments of its structure must be as subject to the laws of inheritance as are other malformations of the body. And just as with other defects, mental disorders may thus flow from pre-existing ancestral maladjustment of the nervous system or from immediate causes thrust upon it, such as syphilis, alcoholism, degeneration of the blood vessels and traumata. Or, in other words, the mechanism of mentality may be faulty from the beginning, or it may be made faulty by bad environmental conditions.

The records of the inheritance of insanity, imbecility, feeble-mindedness and other forms of nervous and mental defects are truly startling. Active researches in this field have been in progress now for several years, and as each new set of investigations comes in the tale is always the same. It is questionable if there is a single genuine case on record where a normal child has been born from a union of two imbeciles. Yet the universal tendency is for defective to mate with defective. Davenport gives a list of examples, beginning with such a one as this: “A feeble-minded man of thirty-eight has a delicate wife who in twenty years has borne him nineteen defective children.” Little wonder, in the light of such facts as these, that the number of degenerates is rapidly increasing in what are called civilized countries.