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Updated: May 8, 2025
It is, for instance, extremely difficult to say where the limit is to be set for permissible marriages. There may be no doubt that feeble-mindedness ought not to be transmitted to the next generation, but have we really a right to prevent the marriage of epileptics or psychasthenics? Can we be surprised then that others already begin to demand that neurasthenics shall not marry?
Vice and misery, suffering and poverty, idleness and dishonesty, feeble-mindedness and idiocy are all blended, but no set-off in virtue and industry is to be found. The strong rogue lives next to the weak and the unfortunate, the hardened old sinner next door to some who are beginning to qualify for a like old age. The place is coated with dirt and permeated with sickening odours.
It may be a matter of opinion which of the two social evils, illegitimacy in the country or prostitution in the city, has the larger influence upon the spread of mental abnormalities, but there can be no doubt that the rural difficulty deserves the attention of all interested in mental hygiene. It is unfortunate that rural people do not realize more often the serious meaning of feeble-mindedness.
There are also the pronounced degrees of feeble-mindedness, which are definitely heritable and not only condemn those who reveal them to a permanent inaptitude for full life, but constitute a subtle poison working through the social atmosphere in all directions and lowering the level of civilisation in the community.
Wheatstone demonstrated by artificial means what was naturally the case in that of the girl here reported. FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS, ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES. By H. H. Goddard. The Macmillan Co., N. Y., 1914. 599 pp., illustrated.
It indicates that the evolution of intelligence has occurred by a gradual progressive advancement, stages in which reappear as the higher grades of feeble-mindedness.
The exceptions are apt to indicate, instead, the close relationship of this irresponsible and chance parenthood to the great social problems of feeble-mindedness, crime and syphilis. Nor is this type of motherhood confined to newly arrived immigrant mothers, as a government report from Akron, Ohio, sufficiently indicates.
Syphilis is the chief cause of feeble-mindedness, paresis, or softening of the brain, and of most other mental defects in children. From the foregoing, it is evident that the proper care of the mother so as to insure a pure blood supply for the offspring ought to be one of the chief concerns of society.
There is every indication that feeble-mindedness in its protean forms is on the increase, that it has leaped the barriers, and that there is truly, as some of the scientific eugenists have pointed out, a feeble-minded peril to future generations unless the feeble-minded are prevented from reproducing their kind.
One does not, as I have said, need to deny heredity in order to resist such legislation, any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world in order to resist an epidemic of witch-burning. I admit there may be such a thing as hereditary feeble-mindedness; I believe there is such a thing as witchcraft.
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