ALCOHOL, DISEASE, AND HEREDITARY DEFECTS 279 



the children of alcoholic mothers may be that the latter are unable 

 to nurse their children as much as mothers not addicted to drink. 

 The role of heredity here is obscured by so many other factors 

 that the real hereditary influence of maternal alcoholism re- 

 mains in doubt. 



One of the strongest indictments against alcohol is that the 

 offspring of people addicted to drink show a high percentage of 

 idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy and insanity, and that when they 

 escape these graver ills they usually fail to reach a normal degree 

 of mental development. The relation of parental alcoholism to 

 epilepsy forms the subject of an extensive monograph of Dr. 

 Sollier on the Influence of Heredity on Alcoholism. This mono- 

 graph is based entirely on the author's own investigation of three 

 hundred and fifty famiHes of alcoholics, one of the members of 

 which was or had been in the wards of the asylum for epileptics 

 at Bicetre. The histories of a large number of cases are given in 

 detail and they contain records of drunkenness, disease, crimes, 

 insanity, feeble-mindedness and a variety of other abnormal 

 traits. "Out of these three hundred and fifty families," Sollier 

 says, "there were two hundred and nine in which we could find 

 no acknowledged hereditary ancestor whose condition would 

 account for the alcoholism. We have however admitted the 

 disease without inheritance in two hundred and nine cases, say in 

 59.71 per cent of the whole number. In one hundred and forty- 

 one cases the alcohoHsm was linked with conditions of heredity; 

 in one hundred and six cases by heredity in similars; in thirty- 

 five cases by heredity in dissimilars. . . . The patients in whose 

 families we have sought to trace the exciting causes of the dis- 

 ease, were all degenerates of a low order, idiotical, incompletely 

 developed, feeble, epileptic." 



The facts stated in the last sentence quoted should warn us 

 to be particularly careful in drawing conclusions. How much of 

 the degeneration in these famiHes is due to the effect of alcohol 

 and how much to bad heredity independent of alcohol we do not 

 know. To what an extent the alcohoHsm which in a number of 

 cases occurs in two generations is to be attributed to heredity we 



