Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results

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THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE SERIES

Edited by HAVELOCK ELLIS

DEGENERACY

PREFACE

The present work is the result of more than twenty years’ labour in a limited medical department of biology. It demonstrates once more the truth of the scientific principle, that the truth or falsity of any theory or working hypothesis becomes more and more demonstrable the further its application is attempted in the explanation of new lines of facts. The truth of the degeneracy doctrine had forced itself on the writer long before its popular apotheosis under Lombroso and Nordau, because it alone sufficed for an explanation of constitutional and local defects (encountered in a seemingly limited speciality of medicine), which local causes failed entirely to explain. The investigations thereon resultant have appeared in medical and dental journals for the past two decades. The present work is chiefly based on these researches. At the same time, the author has drawn largely from all fields of biology cultivated by European investigators, while he must acknowledge a particular indebtedness to the investigations (of which he has made large use beside that elsewhere specifically acknowledged) of certain American investigators—Rush, Parkmen, Ray, G. Frank Lydston, C. L. Dana, C. F. Folsom, W. W. Godding, E. C. Spitzka, E. D. Cope, D. R. Brower, Marsh, B. Sachs, Harriet C. B. Alexander, Clara Barrus, H. M. Bannister, Delia E. Howe, Grace Peckham, Adolph Meyer, Kerlin, Wiley, J. G. Kiernan, W. E. Allison, Osborn, R. Dewey, Frederick Peterson, Gihon, Cowles, W. A. Hammond, A. B. Holder, C. H. Hughes, F. W. Starr, F. C. Hoyt, J. H. McBride, C. K. Mills, C. B. Burr, T. D. Crothers, W. S. Christopher, W. X. Sudduth, A. Lagorio, J. Workman, Wilmarth, and others. These scientists had raised an exceedingly stable foundation for the doctrine of degeneracy long before Lombroso and Nordau (forcing one phase of the subject into popular recognition) compelled an examination of the entire doctrine.

The work has been written with a special intention of reaching educators and parents. With this object, it has avoided laying stress on any one cause of degeneracy, and ignoring factors which produce it and are aggravated by it. The doctrinaire reformer will here find no support for any limited theory. While it does not pretend in the slightest degree to give all the details of degeneracy, it attempts to lay down general principles for practical purposes in a way that permits their application to the solution of sociologic problems.

From a sense of scientific accuracy no attempts have been made to demarcate, rigidly, abnormality from disease, or atavism from arrested development, except as may be done by the features of the cases in which the terms are used. The guiding principle adopted has been that the factors of degeneracy affect in the ancestor the checks on excessive action acquired during the evolution of the race, thus producing a state of nervous exhaustion. The descendant in consequence is unable to reach the state of the ancestor thus nervously exhausted.

For the illustrations, other than those that are original, the author is indebted to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dental Cosmos, The International Dental Journal, The St. Louis Clinical Record, to M. Félix Alcan, and to the officers of the New York State Reformatory and Illinois State Reformatory, Drs. Geo. T. Carpenter, W. A. Pusey, F. S. Coolidge, Ch. Féré, Zuckerkandl, John E. Greves, Amsterdam; Ernst Sjoberg, Stockholm; Bastian, J. G. Kiernan, E. C. Spitzka, John Ridlon, James W. Walker, and Ignatius Donnelly.

E. S. T.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

DEGENERACY

CHAPTER I

Considered as a condition hurtful to the type, the conception of degeneracy may be said to appear even in the precursors of man, since animals destroy soon after birth offspring which, to them, appear peculiar. With that stage of development of the religious sense marked by assigning malign occult powers to natural objects and forces, this view of degeneracy became systematised, and exposed weakly or deformed offspring, charged to evil powers, to death. This occult conception of degeneracy is even yet a part of American folklore. Against degenerate children charms are still used by the “witch-doctors” among the “Pennsylvania Dutch.” These people are on the level of culture of the early seventeenth century middle class English, if not a little below it. The folklore of these, as embodied in Shakespeare, demonstrates, according to J. G. Kiernan,[1] that ere the seventeenth century the fact that “mental and moral defect expressed itself in physical stigmata was recognised and even the term used.” Thistleton Dyer[2] remarks that it is an old prejudice, not yet extinct, that those who are defective or deformed are marked by nature as prone to mischief. Thus in King Richard III. (i. 3) Margaret calls Richard—

“Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog!
Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity
The slave of nature and the son of hell!”

She calls him hog in allusion to his cognisance, which was a boar. A popular expression in Shakespeare’s day for a deformed person was “stigmatic.” It denoted any one who had been stigmatised or burnt with iron (an ignominious punishment), and hence was employed to represent a person on whom nature had set a mark of deformity. Thus in the Third Part of Henry VI. (ii. 2) Queen Margaret says—

“But thou art neither like thy sire nor dam;
But like a foul misshapen stigmatic,
Marked by the destinies to be avoided,
As venom toads, or lizards’ dreadful stings.”

Again in the Second Part of Henry VI. (v. 1) young Clifford says to Richard—

“Foul stigmatic, that’s more than thou canst tell.”

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (v. 1) Oberon wards off degeneracy from the issue of the happy lovers by the following charm—

“And the blots of Nature’s hand
Shall not in their issue stand;
Never mole, hare-lip nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despised in nativity,
Shall upon their children be.”

Constant allusions to this subject occur in old writers, showing how strong was the belief of the early English on this point. King John (iv. 2) calls Hubert, the supposed murderer of Prince Arthur,—

“A fellow by the hand of Nature marked,
Quoted and signed to do a deed of shame.”

Concerning this adaptation of the mind to the deformity of the body Francis Bacon remarks: “Deformed persons are commonly even with Nature, for as Nature hath done ill by them so do they by Nature, being void of natural affection, and so they have their revenge on Nature.”

The quaint old “Anatomist of Melancholy,”[3] Burton, seems but to paraphrase modern curers of degeneracy when, at the end of his chapter on the inheritance of defects, he remarks concerning this fetichistic notion: “So many several ways are we plagued and published for our father’s defaults; in so much that as Fernelius truly saith: ‘It is the greatest part of our felicity to be well born, and it were happy for human kind, if only such parents as are sound of body and mind should be suffered to marry.’ An husbandman will sow none but the best and choicest seed upon his land, he will not rear a bull or an horse, except he be right shapen in all parts, or permit him to cover a mare, except he be well assured of his breed; we make choice of the best rams for our sheep, rear the neatest kine, and keep the best dogs, quanto id diligentius in procreandis liberis observandum! And how careful, then, should we be in begetting of our children! In former times some countries have been so chary in this behalf, so stern, that if a child were crooked or deformed in body or mind, they made him away; so did the Indians of old by the relation of Curtius, and many other well-governed commonwealths according to the discipline of those times. ‘Heretofore in Scotland,’ saith Hect Boethius, ‘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 found to be with child, she with her brood were buried alive’; and this was done for the common good, lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted. A severe doom, you will say, and not to be used amongst Christians, yet more to be looked into than it is. For now by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost free, from some grievous infirmity or other, when no choice is had, but still the eldest must marry, as so many stallions of the race; or if rich, be they fools or dizzards, lame or maimed, unable, intemperate, dissolute, exhaust through riot, as he said, they must be wise and able by inheritance. It comes to pass that our generation is corrupt, we have many weak persons both in body and mind, many feral diseases raging among us, crazed families; our fathers bad, and we are like to be worse.”

This conception gradually developed into the widespread myth of a primevally perfect man through the natural operation of that psychological law whereby, as Macaulay remarks, society, constantly moving forward with eager speed, is as constantly looking backward with tender regret. They turn their eyes and see a lake where an hour before they were toiling through sand.

From this view came the belief that man as existing is degenerate. This degeneracy, while popularly charged to occult influences, was early ascribed by scientists to physical causes. Aristotle, as Osborn[4] points out, appears to have recognised degeneration or the gradual decline of structures in form and usefulness, in his analysis of “movement” in connection with development. Degeneration is first met with as a term in an explanation of the origin of species by Buffon in the eighteenth century. The conception itself occurs in a criticism by Sylvius of Vesalius (1514-64), who had asserted that the anatomy of Galen could not have been founded upon the human body, because he had described an intermaxillary bone. This bone, Vesalius observed, is found in the lower animals but not in man. Sylvius (1614-72) defends Galen on the ground that though man had no intermaxillary bone at present this is no proof of its absence in Galen’s time. “It is luxury, it is sensuality, which has gradually deprived man of this bone.” This passage, as Osborn remarks, proves that the idea of degeneration of structures through disuse, as well as the idea of the inheritance of the effect of habit, or the “transmission of acquired characters,” is a very ancient one. Sylvius, while here recognising factors of degeneracy, erred in considering disappearance of the intermaxillary bone, not reappearance, as degeneracy. He failed to recognise, moreover, the law of economy of growth by which one structure is sacrificed for another or for the organism as a whole. This law, indicated by Aristotle, but clearly outlined by Goethe in 1807, and Geoffroy St. Hilaire in 1818, underlies the physiological atrophies and hypertrophies which play such a part in degeneracy.

The Twelve Cæsars of Suetonius (that stud book of imperial degeneracy as it has been styled) stamps the decided impression on its readers that Hippocratian notions of degenerate heredity strongly permeated Roman thought, to revive in those Arabic, Italian, and British (Roger Bacon) thinkers who created the scientific phase of the revival of learning.

In the science of medicine, as developed by Hippocrates,[5] the modern conception of degeneracy is evident. Hippocrates argues against the “sacred” nature of epilepsy, since it is a hereditary disease and hence comes under the operation of physical law. He furthermore points out, as did Aristotle, that epilepsy produced in the ancestor by traumatism and other physical causes may be inherited by the child.

As the degeneration phase of evolution was less antagonistic to the religious theory forced into biblical dogma by the Jesuit Suarez (in opposition to the evolutionary views of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas), being supported by biblical dicta (that when the fathers had eaten sour grapes the children’s teeth were set on edge) and fetichistic folklore, it retained a dominance that the advanced phase lost. From the time of Hippocrates, psychiatry (the science devoted to mental disorders) continued to accumulate data of the origin and transmission of human defects. The impetus given the evolutionary explanation of these data by the seventeenth and eighteenth century biologists (Harvey, Buffon, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, and others) laid the foundation for the modern doctrine of degeneracy.

Buffon[6] remarks that many species are being perfected or degenerated by the great changes in land and sea, by the favours or disfavours of Nature, by food, by the prolonged influences of climate, contrary or favourable, and are no longer what they formerly were. He regarded temperature, food, and climate as the three great factors in the alteration and degeneration of animals.

Erasmus Darwin[7] considers that all life starts from a living filament having the capability of being excited into action by certain stimuli. This capability is that whereby plants and animals react to their environment, causing changes in them which are transmitted to their offspring. All animals undergo transformations which are in part produced by their own exertions in response to pleasures and pains, and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity. Other effects of this excitability (such as constitute hereditary diseases, like scrofula, epilepsy, insanity) have their origin in one or perhaps two generations, as in the progeny of those who drink much vinous spirits. Those hereditary propensities cease again if one or two sober generations succeed, otherwise the family becomes extinct.

Benjamin Rush[8] (greatly influenced by the Erasmus Darwin school) remarks that through hereditary sameness of organisation of the nerves, brain and blood vessels, the predisposition to insanity pervades whole families and renders them liable to this disease from a transient and feeble operation of its causes. Insanity when hereditary is excited by more feeble causes than in persons in whom this predisposition has been acquired. It generally attacks the descendants in those stages of life in which it has appeared in the ancestors. Children born previously to the attack of madness in their parents are less liable to inherit it than those who are born after it. Children born of parents who are in the decline of life are more predisposed to insanity than children born under contrary circumstances. A predisposition to certain diseases, seated in parts contiguous to the seat of insanity, often descends from parents to their children. Thus it occurs in a son whose father or mother has been afflicted only with hysteria or habitual headaches. The reverse likewise takes place. There are families in which insanity has existed where the disease has spared the mind in the posterity, but appeared in great strength and eccentricity of the memory and of the passions, or in great perversion of their moral faculties. Sometimes it passes by all the faculties of the mind, and appears only in the nervous system of persons descended from deranged parents; again, madness occurs in children whose parents were remarkable only for eccentricity of mind. Among the diseases that attack the children of the insane, but did not exist in their ancestors, are consumption and epilepsy.

Similar studies were later published by Pinel, Tissot, Chiarrurgi, Stedman, Parkman, Brigham, Prichard, Esquirol, Jacobi, and other American, English, French, Italian, and German alienists. Based upon the data thus obtained, and upon the general principles thus outlined, then appeared—nearly at the same time as the like epoch-making work (on another phase of evolution), Darwin’s Origin of Species—Morel’s Treatise on Human Degeneracy, wherein the principle of natural selection was shown to involve the recognition of the physical conditions that constitute degeneracy, and, necessarily, to exclude primeval perfection. Morel’s definition of degeneration as a marked departure from the original type tending more or less rapidly to the extinction of it, forms the basis of commonly accepted definitions.

While Morel practically outlined the modern study of degeneracy, his theologic timidity forced an absolute definition of a state which, according to his own admission, was purely relative. After fencing somewhat with the position that there was a primevally perfect man,[9] he admits with Tessier the primeval lowness of man, but also thinks that the fall of man could create new conditions which, in his descendants, from heredity and from causes acting on their health, tended to make them depart from the primitive type. These departures from the primitive type have led to varieties, some of which constitute races capable of transmitting racial characteristics. Other varieties in the races themselves have created the abnormal states which Morel has denominated degeneracies. Each of these degeneracies has its own stamp from the cause that produces it. Their common characteristic is hereditary transmission under graver conditions than normal heredity. With certain exceptional instances of regeneration, the progeny of degenerates presents progressive degradation. This may reach such limits that humanity is preserved by its excess. It is not necessary, however, that the ultimate stage of degradation be reached before sterility occurs. Morel confines degeneracy to a pathologic type, criticising F. Heusinger[10] for applying the term degenerate to domestic animals which “throw back” to the wild or original type. Morel’s admission that causes influencing health produce deviations which, under favouring conditions, become racial types capable of indefinite transmission, saves him from absolute scientific inaccuracy, but renders inconsistent his limitation of degeneracy. It may be convenient to separate diseased states from anomalies, but such separation can only be very relative. From his conservatism and his plentiful data, Morel aroused much less antagonism than did a contemporary, Moreau (de Tours), who bore to him the relation of Darwin to Wallace.[11] While Moreau devotes much attention to the factors of degeneracy and its stigmata (or marks), like Morel, his main point is the expansion of the theory of Aristotle which Dryden epigrammatised into—

“Great wit to madness nearly is allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

As J. G. Kiernan shows,[12] this doctrine, early in the history of the race, obtained dominance through the evolution of arts, sciences, and religions from fetichism. Phenomena manifested by fetich priests (of the Shaman type) so closely resembled epileptic insanity in its frenzies and visions that the two states were long regarded as identical, whence the term “morbus sacer.” The supernatural influences which, in current belief, underlay epilepsy were, at the outset, malign or benign as they were offended or placated. They became benign, and the insane were under protection of a deity, as in Mussulman countries. Later still the demon-possession theory gained dominance, and at length the demon sank into disease. Throughout all this evolution the belief in an inherent affinity between insanity and genius persisted.

Aristotle, in whose day the disease notion was becoming dominant, asserts that, under the influence of head congestion, persons sometimes become prophets, sybils, and poets. Thus Mark, the Syracusan, was a pretty fair poet during a maniacal attack, but could not compose when sane. Men illustrious in poetry, arts, and statesmanship are often insane, like Ajax, or misanthropic like Bellerophon. Even at a recent period similar dispositions are evident in Plato, Socrates, Empedocles, and many others, above all, the poets.

According to Plato, “Delirium is by no means evil, but when it comes by gift of the gods, a very great benefit. In delirium the sibyls of Delphi and Dodona were of great service to Greece, but when in cold blood were of little or none. Frequently, when the gods afflicted men with epidemics, a sacred delirium inspired some men with a remedy for these. The Muses excite some souls to delirium to glorify heroes with poetry, or to instruct future generations.”

Precedent to the works of Morel and Moreau appeared their source and inspiration, Prosper Lucas’s Natural Heredity.[13] Here the biologic current of thought encountered the sociologic current; although the waves clashed, the two currents merged into and modified each other. The biologist demonstrated that degenerate types often “threw back” in their structures, and this very “throwing back” made them the fittest to survive. The sociologist found that the only test of acquired or inherited degeneracy in man was disaccord with environment. The co-existent moral and physical defects resultant on heredity found by Erasmus Darwin, Rush, Parkman, Grohmann, and others tended to show that all types of defectives might be a product of heredity.