352 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



our character, temperament, and special abilities; they are forced upon u§ 

 by our parents," and the pronunciamento of E. A. Wiggam that the en- 

 vironment plays no part, and that we can never escape the effects of hered- 

 ity, science is drawing closer to the conviction that with the mental diseases 

 as with such physical characteristics as sex and stature, T, H. A4organ's 

 opinion is the most trustworthy, Morgan says: "The gene acts as a differen- 

 tial turning the balance in a given direction affecting certain characters 

 more conspicuously than others. Let us not forget that the environment 

 may also act as a differential, intensifying or diminishing as the case may 

 be the action of the genes." 



Neurotics are both born and made, and it is wise not to be alarmed at 

 the implications of genetics. If mental abnormality is due to a single gene, 

 the defective genes of the child inherited from both parents may be so 

 arranged in the chromosome threads that they do not lie side by side, and 

 the child will not inherit this defect. Said Ray Lyman Wilbur, "Human 

 beings do not deal with our defectives, our insane, in the same way as do 

 animals. No doubt foolish dogs are born, but unless they happen to get 

 into the hands of foolish ladies, they soon succumb." Nazi Germany in 

 1934, in the name of race purity, issued a decree ordering the sterilization 

 of its 200,000 feeble-minded, 60,000 epileptics, 50,000 schizophrenics, 

 20,000 manic-depressives, and another 47,000 defectives including "heredi- 

 tary" alcoholics and the hereditary deaf, decisions to be made by Heredi- 

 tary Hygiene Courts. More than fifty-six thousand sterilization operations 

 were performed there within one year of the issuance of the decree. 



Eugenic sterilization laws are on the statute books of twenty-seven states 

 in our own country but they are seldom enforced. New York passed such 

 a law in 19 12, but it was declared unconstitutional. Oklahoma sterilizes 

 the hereditarily insane as well as its three-time convicts. California, home 

 of the over-zealous Human Betterment Foundation which would sterilize 

 fifteen million Americans, accounts for two-thirds of all the eugenic sterili- 

 zation in the United States. During the last thirty years, more than four 

 thousand insane and two thousand feeble-minded persons were sterilized 

 by this state. It uses the painless technique of tying the ducts from the 

 testes or ovaries without modifying the internal secretions of the gonads 

 or otherwise interfering with the sex life of the individual. Such individuals, 

 however, can no longer become fathers or mothers. 



The other camp numbers a large army of men and women who oppose 

 sterilization on the ground that science knows too little about mental 

 diseases. Who can say, they insist, what will be incurable tomorrow? They 

 point to Mozart, Pascal, Mohammed, Schiller, Paganini, as great men who 

 were epileptic. They single out Kepler, both of whose parents were men- 

 tally diseased, and they tell us that Francis Bacon's mother was insane. And 

 some are willing to pay the price of mental disease for the world's geniuses. 

 Convinced that the partition between sanity and insanity is indeed a thin 



