Schlapp: Causes of Defective Children 



389 



strugi^le to adjust to a totally alien 

 environment worse than brutal. The 

 mother was forced out into the eco- 

 nomic fight. At about the same time 

 she l)ecame pregnant with die second 

 child. That rest, that repose which all 

 women need for the labors of child 

 creation, was denied her. Instead of 

 the cool mornings, the hot days and the 

 long purple evenings of her Ligurian 

 hills, she had the drudgery of a mill 

 for her ease. Naturally, she was seized 

 with a powerful nostalgia. Her home 

 and her past beckoned her out of the 

 inferno into which she had wandered. 

 ( )utwardly. the miserable woman's 

 emotions cooked over into constant 

 tears. Inwardl}'. they seethed up into 

 a very grave disturbance of the endo- 

 crines. In this condition she struggled 

 through the forming and bearing of 

 the second child, and then of the third. 

 .\t length, something of the measure- 

 less traged}' of her situation weighed 

 upon her, and she came to the clinic 

 with her microcephalic children — idiots. 

 (Again see Frontispiece.) 



It was impossible to induce this 

 mother to submit herself to the various 

 metabolism tests, but even outwardly 

 she gave unmistakable evidences of a 

 disturbed metabolism due to chemical 

 imbalance. She was not, however, in 

 the least microcephalic. And it will be 

 well, at this point, to accentuate the 

 fact that mothers of microcephalic 

 children rarely, if ever, show any of 

 the faults of their unhappy progeny. 

 Our problem, in these cases, is appar- 

 ently one of prenatal chemistry, not of 

 heredity. If these pathological types 

 were to breed, no doubt many of the 

 cases would reproduce a similar defect. 

 In other words, we have here 

 possibly a mutation. These cases, how- 

 ever, being so defeective, there is no 

 possibility of their breeding. How 

 many such defects may be continued 

 In' heredity after once having been es- 

 tablished by serious environmental 

 changes is not known, although Stock- 

 ard, of Cornell, has shown that mal- 

 formation produced in the ofifspring by 

 extrinsic toxins being: introduced into 



the parent can be lost in three or four 

 generations and the animal returned to 

 the normal condition. If the patho- 

 logical change in the offspring of a dis- 

 turbed mother is slight enough not to 

 inhibit reproduction, it may very read- 

 ily be continued for a number of gen- 

 erations. This mother showed symp- 

 toms indicative of constitutional im- 

 balance caused by endocrine disorder, 

 such as depression, intense restlessness, 

 insomnia, loss of appetite and of 

 weight, tremors, profuse perspiration, 

 palpitation of the heart, and so forth. 



Case 2. We have here an Ameri- 

 can-born mother- of four children, all 

 of them born within five years. (See 

 Figure 1.) It will be seen that the 

 first and the second children are per- 

 fectly normal. The third child fol- 

 lowed fast upon the two earlier ones, 

 and, to make matters worse, the 

 mother, in the first month of preg- 

 nancy with this child, contracted in- 

 fluenza and was in bed for three or 

 four weeks. After the illness she was 

 unable to recover her strength, and in 

 this depleted state of her forces she 

 passed through the remainder of the 

 child-bearing period. The fruit of this 

 set of circumstances is, as may be seen, 

 a typical Mongolian idiot. 



The mother could not nurse the 

 child, but after some months she recov- 

 ered strength rapidly, and within fif- 

 teen months after the birth of the third 

 child she brought the fourth child into 

 the world. This infant gave all the 

 normal responses and is apparently 

 healthy. 



Mongolian Idiocy Due to Endocrine 

 Disturbance 



It is, of course, well known that the 

 Mongolian type of idiot is commonly 

 the child of a mother who is nearing 

 the menopause. At this period of a 

 woman's life the hormone balance is 

 seriously disturbed. From my own 

 observations and those of many others, 

 it is now safe to conclude that Mon- 

 golian idiots are also frequently born 

 of younger women whose endocrines 

 have been disturbed bv the drain of in- 



