Southard: Eugenics vs. Cacogenics 



413 



emerge (d) with the most developed 

 eugenics of all {aristogenics) ? 



I have naturally no time here to 

 develope a thesis concerning the respec- 

 tive natures of health and disease. 

 Some years ago, under the guidance of 

 my friend Professor Royce, I tried to 

 clear up, for myself at least, this 

 peculiar problem that had so long faced 

 me as a pathologist, what is the essen- 

 tial nature of disease? To put the 

 results briefly, I concluded that the 

 statistical or metric conception of 

 disease — the conception which contrasts 

 the normal with the subnormal, super- 

 normal, or abnormal — was not the 

 only or perhaps the most valuable con- 

 ception of disease. The pathometric 

 branch of biology was not, I concluded, 

 the only kind of pathology. To be 

 sure, pathometry yielded important 

 data and aided in establishing important 

 norms of magnitude, shape, color, con- 

 sistence, of organs, as well as graphs of 

 their functions. And, no doubt also, 

 it was often true that the abnormal 

 happened at the same time to be the 

 morbid and that the anomaly consti- 

 tuted a disease in some still more per- 

 suasive sense. 



As against pathometry or the measur- 

 ing kind of pathology, there was 

 another kind of pathology interested in 

 the survival or destruction of cells, cell- 

 organs, and their functions. There 

 was a kind of pathology interested in 

 the life and death of organoids, cells, 

 cell-complexes, tissues, organs, and the 

 organism, as well as in the preservation 

 or termination of their functions. There 

 was a pathology not so much interested 

 in the more-or-less as in the all-or- 

 nothing of living units and processes. 

 It is hard to find a term for this pathology 

 of outcome instead of graduation, of 

 survival rather than amount of proto- 

 plasm. Perhaps it may be provisionally 

 termed necrohiotics, revamping a term 

 often used in descriptive cellular path- 

 ology for a tissue containing both dead 

 and living elements. 



Hurrying by the vast undefined 

 landscapes which these words bring 

 into view, I wish to suggest that there 

 is probably a kind of cacogenics which 



does not signify mere difference of point 

 of view (as good beef-cattle might be 

 cacogenic products for one who was 

 breeding milch-cows) and again does 

 not merely signify a less eugenic product 

 (as talent fades beside genius), but 

 rather is a science descriptive of ways 

 in which man is (not improved but) 

 deteriorated (not through environment 

 but) through heredity. 



Suppose some one could prove senes- 

 cence to be a process going on in the 

 germ-plasm, as we see it go on in the 

 somatic tissues, so that the race was 

 gradually to decline or cataclysmically 

 to cease. Here would be an absolutely 

 cacogenic factor. 



Or suppose some one could show that 

 special properties in one gamete could 

 propotently poison the zygote, so that 

 Mendelian percentages and Galtonian 

 tendencies would alike be abolished, 

 whenever that gametic strain was united 

 with another. I have sometimes 

 thought that such might be the case 

 with the germ-plasm of certain feeble- 

 minded subjects, since upon their union 

 with apparent normals, feeble-minded 

 progeny were produced in alarming 

 disproportion. 



Of course, too. it is clear that disease 

 may alter, not merely the soma, but 

 also the germ-plasm. It is not clear 

 but that characters acquired by the 

 germ-plasm may be inherited, although 

 I suppose the principle needs proof. It 

 often seems to the alienist that alcohol- 

 ism and especially syphilis may well be 

 guilty of such cacogenic modifications 

 of the sex-cells. 



SUMMARY. 



1 . The eugenics propaganda presents 

 ethical difficulty in view of our ignorance 

 not merely how to breed better men, but 

 actually what improvement or improve- 

 ments we seek. 



2. The plant and animal breeders 

 know what they are breeding towards, 

 and hence face problems of technique 

 only ; the eugenist, it may be feared, does 

 not know to what he ought to breed 

 (unless we are content with generalities 

 like "citizenship" or "brain-power") 



