1 82 THE NEXT GENERATION 



cretins began to slip out of sight at Aosta. Dr. Jordan dis- 

 covered this fact in 1910. He had gone to the place expect- 

 ing to find conditions about as they were when he was there 

 before. But, "to my surprise," he says, " I was unable for 

 some time to find a single cretin or even anybody who knew 

 the meaning of the word." 



By asking questions, however, he soon learned that, about 

 twenty years before, Aosta had put all its old poor people 

 into asylums. It also appeared that gradually all the cretins 

 had been put there too — the men in one part of the estab- 

 lishment, the women in the other. The two groups were 

 kept absolutely separate — no mixing and mating ever being 

 allowed. As a result, in no case was there any second gen- 

 eration. Those cretins and goitrous persons had no descend- 

 ants to inherit their woe. They were the last of their kind. 

 So true was this that, as Dr. Jordan writes, " there is but one 

 cretin left — an old woman four feet high, who has the in- 

 telligence and, for that matter, the manners of a lap dog, very 

 affectionate but without any mental capacity." He goes on 

 to say that he visited the orphan asylum of Aosta and found 

 " every child bright and alert, without a touch of goiter or of 

 cretinism " ; that he " inspected beggars standing in rows at 

 the railway station, weak, inconsequential, useless, most of 

 them, but not a cretin among them." The truth of course re- 

 mains, that if healthy people live in conditions which bring 

 disease to the thyroid gland, they will suffer accordingly ; but 

 this is a different matter from beginning life as an idiot who 

 is a cretin. 



But to come nearer home. Turn from cretins in Italy and 

 Switzerland to the feeble-minded in other lands. Dr. Hurty did 

 this one day in Indiana. He was visiting an institution which 

 admits only those who have feeble brains of one sort or another. 



