The gist of the present article may then thus be summed up: That self-indulgence and excessive sexual cohabitation are hurtful in the highest degree; that they induce early impuissance, and bring down a load of menial and corporeal ailments. That premature marriages are destructive to health and long life, and that weak and sickly children are the general result where impregnation of the female follows. That entire continence was never ordained, and is alike productive of disease. That moderate copulation propagates the human kind, preserves health, and promotes longevity, and the sexual capability is thereby retained to the latest verge of senility.
That it is unnatural and unjust for impuissant persons to intermarry with those having healthy expectations, and the power of enjoyment; and that it behooves all who have a doubt as to their own capacity, to have that doubt removed; but, if rendered evident, to abstain from shipwrecking their own happiness, or from occasioning disappointment to others.
THE HEREDITARY TRANSMISSION OF DISEASE.
The topics of Incontinence, Celibacy, and Marriage, having been severally considered relatively to their effects on society, viewed alike also as to their influence on the health and happiness of the sexes in general, another equally engrossing one naturally presents itself for inquiry to every thinking and sensible person who may contemplate, or be about embarking in what the world deems “a serious speculation,” matrimony, namely, the probability of issue, and how far the health of the progeny may be influenced by that of the parents. That conception requires the necessary aptitudes in both man and wife is indisputable; and that although such capacities are rarely absent, still all unions are not prolific; hence the inference, that some cause must exist to account for such infertility.
It may be local or moral, as elsewhere in this volume explained, which not being the main purport of this paper, needs no other allusion beyond the mere reference. The prevailing resemblance between parents and children in features, form, voice, and even constitutional peculiarities, is sufficiently well known to satisfy any one of the similar possibility of the transmission of disease, or sound health. “It is of great consequence to be well-born; and it were happy for human kind, if only such persons as are sound of body and mind should be allowed to marry.”
We find in Boethius’s work, “De veterum Scotorum Moribus,” that anciently, in Scotland, if any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease, which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and, if by chance, having some such disease, she were to be found with child, she with her offspring was buried alive. The Spartans destroyed all weakly and deformed children.
Great as the anxiety may be to perpetuate our identities, to create new objects on whom we may concentrate all our affections and love, and who, when born to us, so instinctively bind us the more to this already attractive world, where is the man who does not feel humbled and mortified at beholding in his anxiously looked-for offspring, the unfolding of infirmity and disease? We are content to encounter the ordinary chances of mortality, let but our children bear the impress of health, and possess the shape of perfect man; but sad and desolating are the reflections that spring from observing in our issue the developments of the evils we have nurtured in ourselves. How many existing beings are there, inhaling the breath of life, in whom every respiration feeds the flame of disease, ignited by those from whose loins they sprung, and is hastening them to a premature tomb. How many are there, secluded from the enjoyment of that, which being deprived of by some scrofulous, pestilential, or other hideous deformity, renders them like isolated wanderers on the earth, and for ever forbids their participation in the main charm of existence—social intercourse. How many living specimens of human prototypes, in whom reason is obliterated, or never dawned, drag on an existence inferior in enjoyment to the forest-hunted beast, or the animal whose life is yielded for the nutriment of man. And are not the diseases that involve so calamitous a result, consumption, scrofula, gout, idiocy, or insanity, traceable in particular families, to the remotest periods of their ancestral records? And should not then a knowledge of cause and effect, like that just detailed, induce individuals about to fulfil one of the purposes to which they were certainly destined, for the perpetuation of their own race, if only from the pride of human nature, well to consider the result of such a consummation? The health of either party is generally omitted among the categories bandied about preliminary to the completion of the other, though decidedly not more important, arrangements of the nuptial contract; or if it should not be, many infirmities, that are well known to descend hereditarily, are (granted in some cases not premeditatedly, but from ignorance of such a result) yet carefully concealed. Cutaneous blemishes, incipient tubercles, or a scrofulous predisposition, which may be likened to the germes of a fruitful plant sown in a torpid soil, lie in ambush, and await some genial transplantation to display their productiveness, which matrimony, by the analogous change which it effects in different constitutions, speedily encourages. In this manner, other morbid phenomena are aroused from their lurking place, whether it be in the brain, the lungs, or the blood, and transferred to those who succeed us.