ioo MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



confirmed by Moreau, who says : " It is rare that the 

 form the malady assumes does not present the most 

 striking resemblance, sometimes even a true identity." 

 During ten years' experience amongst the insane I may 

 say I have met with the same form of mental disorder 

 repeated in different members of the same family suffi- 

 ciently often to induce me to agree to a great extent 

 with this dictum of Moreau. But although every form 

 of insanity tends thus to be transmitted unchanged in 

 the family, all forms are not equally stable, some being 

 much more commonly transmitted unaltered than others. 

 Of all forms of mental disease by far the most certainly 

 transmitted unaltered is the propensity to suicide ; the 

 other forms in order of frequency following thus dip- 

 somania, melancholia, monomanias, mania, imbecility. 



Dr. Stewart of the Crichton Institution, after a study 

 of 901 cases of mental disease, gave the proportion of 

 hereditary cases in the different forms of insanity thus : 

 Melancholia, 57.7; dipsomania, 63.4; mania, 5 i.o ; mono- 

 mania, 49.0 ; moral insanity, 50.0 ; general paralysis, 

 47.6 ; and idiocy and imbecility, 36.0 per cent. 



A striking example of transmission of the suicidal 

 propensity is given by Dr. Hammond of New York,* 

 the case being the more remarkable from the fact that 

 exactly the same means were adopted to destroy life 

 and at about the same age in each of the three genera- 

 tions : " A gentleman well-to-do in the world, but 

 with a slight hereditary tendency to insanity, killed 

 himself in the thirty-fifth year of his age by cutting his 

 * " Insanity and its Medical Kelations." 



