54 



Indiana University studies 



unstable mental and nervous make-up makes fertile soil for the 

 implanting of bad habits of life and their cansequence of disease. 

 Persons of mental instability, then, should not be allowed to 

 participate in the propagation of the race. 



Education of the public regarding the causes of the prevent- 

 able forms of insanity — as alcoholic and drug psychoses and gen- 

 eral paralysis — should result in their gradual elimination. Here 

 again, early recognition and care, now omitted thru ignorance 

 and neglect, constitute a means of prevention. Among those dis- 

 charged from insane hospitals as cured or improved, there is 

 need for home supervision and education along lines of mental 

 hygiene, both for the x^atient and his family, that he may learn 

 to live within his limit of resistance to mental disorder. Public 

 enlightenment regarding the insane should result in a successful 

 combating of the unfounded fears and prejudices regarding the 

 ins+itutions for their care. 



Criminality and its relationship to insanity, epilepsy, and 

 feeble mindedness is the subject of many discussions today. Mr. 

 Davenport says: ''The question whether a given person is a case 

 for the penitentiary or the hospital is not primarily a legal ques- 

 tion but one for a physician with the aid of a student of heredity 

 and family histories.''^ It has been suggested that much time 

 and money would be saved and many legal entanglements avoided, 

 if every person convicted of crime could be examined by a "jury 

 of neurologii.ts" before appearing before a jury of laymen.^ Per- 

 haps better methods of punishment and control might also result 

 from such a procedure. 



It is a reproach to our intelligence that we as a people, proud in other 

 respects of our control of nature, should have to support about half a 

 million insane, feeble-minded, epileptic, blind and deaf, eighty thousand 

 prisoners and one hundred thousand paupers at a cost of over one hundred 

 million dollars per year. A new plague that rendered 4 per cent of our 

 population, chiefly at the most productive age, not merely incompetent but 

 a burden costing one hundred million dollars yearly to support, would 

 instantly attract universal attention: But we have become so used to 

 crime, disease and degeneracy that we take them as necessary evils. That 

 they were so in the world's ignorance is granted ; that they must remain 

 so is denied.* 



2 Charles B. Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, p. 92. 



3 Dr. Charles D. Humes, Indianapolis. 



* Charles Benedict Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, p. 4. 



