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Updated: May 8, 2025
There is, of course, disharmony through ordinary defect as in feeble-mindedness, as in absence of some essential emotion or instinct. These are hopeless situations and belong in the grim field of psychopathology. Often what seems to be a defect is a "sleeping" quality, and one that will awaken under appropriate circumstance. Conspicuously, maternal love is of this nature.
Are we to check the infant mortality rate among the feeble-minded and aid the unfortunate offspring to grow up, a menace to the civilized community even when not actually certifiable as mentally defective or not obviously imbecile? Other figures and studies indicate the close relationship between feeble-mindedness and the spread of venereal scourges.
Of the situation in England, Bertrand Russell said in 1917: "If an average sample were taken out of the population of England, and their parents were examined, it would be found that prudence, energy, intellect and enlightenment were less common among the parents than in the population in general; while shiftlessness, feeble-mindedness, stupidity and superstition were more common than in the population in general ... Mutual liberty is making the old form of marriage impossible while a new form is not yet developed."
In studying the cases of several hundred delinquent girls, as a consultant to the Parole Department of Massachusetts, it was found that the family life of the girls could be classified in two ways. The majority of the girls that reached the Reformatory came from bad homes, homes in which drunkenness, prostitution, feeble-mindedness, and insanity were common traits of the parents.
The mating of our children must be inspired, not directed. There is one taint from which society has the right and the duty of freeing itself, so far as in its power lies. This is the taint of feeble-mindedness. Of all the calamities that can befall a human being, feeble-mindedness is, perhaps, the worst.
In persons afflicted with uncontrollable impulses, the inhibiting hormones may not be present in sufficient quantity. Feeble-mindedness, ranging from stupidity to imbecility, may also be a direct effect of insufficient endocrine supply to the brain cells.
Among such peoples greater demands were probably made on inborn intelligence than among modern industrial populations. As regards the CAUSES of feeble-mindedness Goddard's findings are wholly negative, but not less valuable on that account.
Students of sociology are making clear to us that a large portion of the criminality of the world, much of the looseness of life, and a large part of the alcoholic excesses are due to this taint of feeble-mindedness. Recent investigations have made it clear that one feeble-minded family in a community may, in the course of years, poison the life of an entire state.
At present the defective child who requires treatment and improves in the special class suffers a great handicap by being in the country rather than in the city. Without doubt epilepsy and psychopathic cases, as well as feeble-mindedness, receive relatively less attention in the country than in the city.
To which I reply, first of all, that he cannot produce a feeble-minded child. The whole point of our contention is that this phrase conveys nothing fixed and outside opinion. There is such a thing as mania, which has always been segregated; there is such a thing as idiotcy, which has always been segregated; but feeble-mindedness is a new phrase under which you might segregate anybody.
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