MARRIAGE AND INSANITY. 99 



be totally lost in the children from the action of the 

 vis medicatrix naturae,; whereas if they marry into a 

 family like their own, there will be little chance of 

 reversion to the healthy type, most likely the peculiar 

 conformation or temperament which predisposes to 

 insanity will be accentuated in the children, and pro- 

 bably idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy, chorea, drunkenness, 

 crime, suicide, or insanity will make its appearance in 

 the degenerate offspring, as in some of the families 

 whose histories are given in these pages. 



All these diseases, together with neuralgia, hysteria, 

 cancer, and the lie, are allied, and, following some law 

 at present unknown to us, replace each other in 

 successive generations, and in different individuals of 

 the same generation in a manner at present inexplic- 

 able (vide p. 49). Thus the son of an insane parent 

 may be a confirmed drunkard, and he in turn may 

 beget a family one member of which may inherit his 

 father's vice, while another may be epileptic, another 

 idiotic, and yet another who, perhaps after giving early 

 promise of superior intellectual attainment, will become 

 insane. But although these allied diseased conditions 

 do exchange places in unaccountable manner in neurotic 

 families, we are not by any means without examples 

 of the transmission of the same form of mental disease 

 through several generations, or even of the same mental 

 disease appearing at almost exactly the same age and 

 under like circumstances. 



Esquirol was of opinion that as a rule the same form 

 of mental disease was transmitted, and this opinion was 



