THE STRUGGLE FOR RACE.IMPROVEMENT 



IN SWEDEN 



BY 



Professor J. VILH. HULTKRANTZ and Dr. E. BERGMAN 



UPPSALA 



IN SWEDEN AS EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD -- IT IS 

 first during the last decades in reality, that one has arrived at the know* 

 ledge that our efforts to protect the race against degeneration and raise 

 its level only by an improvement in the environment (euthenics) are tolerably 

 fruitless, and that the most effective means of reaching this goal is by a favourable 

 selection of the parents, through whom good qualities can be transmitted to the 

 next generation (eugenics). Thus it is of importance to seek to hinder, as far 

 as possible, the reproduction of inferior individuals, and to increase the nativity 

 among the better stock instead, as well as to prevent immigration of inferior, and 

 emigration of the fittest individuals. It is the discovery of the laws of heredity 

 together with the favourable results of modern breeding of plants and animals 

 which has brought about this inversion of our ideas of the race*problem. 



In the Swedish legislation from older times though, there is to be found an 

 interesting example of clear insight respecting the right way for race*betterment. 

 In the preamble to a law promulgated in the year 1757 forbidding marriage to 

 those having falling sickness it says: And inasmuch as, according to the humble 

 report issued by Collegium Medicum, the most experienced medical men from 

 the oldest times have agreed, that a true falling sickness called epilepsia idiopa* 

 thica, is reproduced by the parents in the children and children's children; and 

 as daily experience attests that scarcely any are burdened with this grave malady, 

 so long as none of their forefathers, on the father's or on the mother's side, have 



been afflicted with falling sickness for this reason and because We find the 



only means of rooting out gradually the true falling sickness, to be, to forbid 

 marriage altogether for the persons, be they men or women, who are troubled 

 herewith, it is Our gracious will and command* etc. Statutes which could work 

 in an eugenic direction are certainly to be found among some of the older laws, 

 such as the Mosaic, but in the Swedish statute just mentioned it seems to be 

 the first time that the intention of protecting coming generations has been di 

 stinctly pronounced, and it is therefore we have given this detailed quotation. 

 The hopes, that by these means epilepsy could gradually be rooted out, have 

 unfortunately not been realized, chiefly on account of the difficulties met with in 

 carrying out the law rigorously. Epilepsy is still rather common in Sweden. 

 The number of those having falling sickness is very probably at least 7,000. With 

 the enrolment of conscripts during the last years, something over 2 per thousand 

 of the men examined have been rejected on account of this malady. 



