106 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



he wrote, and in which it still appeared in some 

 members of the fourth and fifth generations." 



It may be said at once that no family is safe, any 

 member of which has suffered any form of mental 

 disorder, from whatever cause. Of course there are 

 cases where mental disorder follows prolonged in- 

 temperate habits, injuries to the head, sunstroke and 

 the like, but even here the mental disturbance generally 

 points to a peculiar temperament which predisposes 

 to mental disease, and in a great many of these cases 

 careful search will discover in near relatives insanity, 

 or peculiarities approaching thereto. It is not every 

 one who has suffered from sunstroke or has had a 

 blow on the head that goes insane, and when we find 

 upon inquiry that the majority of those who do, belong 

 to neurotic families and have insane relatives, while 

 the majority of those who do not are members of 

 untainted families, there is but one conclusion to be 

 drawn, viz., that even in what may be called traumatic 

 insanity, hereditary predisposition cannot be ignored. 

 Besides, it must be remembered that acquired diseased 

 conditions of this kind tend to be transmitted to 

 children afterwards begotten, as was the epilepsy 

 artificially produced by Brown-Sequard in guinea-pigs 

 transmitted to their young. Hence the man or woman 

 who has been insane, be the cause what it may, can 

 never be justified in becoming a parent. Even those 

 in whose families general paralysis has occurred, 

 should be most careful not to marry into a neurotic 

 family, for this most hopeless disease, which was long 



