Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results

CHAPTER I. Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Considered as a condition hurtful to the type, the conception of degeneracy may be said to appear even in the precursors of man, since animals destroy soon after birth offspring which, to them, appear peculiar. With that stage of development of the religious sense marked by assigning malign occult powers to natural objects and forces, this view of degeneracy became systematised, and exposed weakly or deformed offspring, charged to evil powers, to death. This occult conception of degeneracy is even yet a part of American folklore. Against degenerate children charms are still used by the "witch-doctors" among the "Pennsylvania Dutch." These people are on the level of culture of the early seventeenth century middle class English, if not a little below it. The folklore of these, as embodied in Shakespeare, demonstrates, according to J. G. Kiernan, that ere the seventeenth century the fact that "mental and moral defect expressed itself in physical stigmata was recognised and even the term used." Thistleton Dyer remarks that it is an old prejudice, not yet extinct, that those who are defective or deformed are marked by nature as prone to mischief. Thus in King Richard III. (i. 3) Margaret calls Richard--

"Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog! Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity The slave of nature and the son of hell!"

She calls him hog in allusion to his cognisance, which was a boar. A popular expression in Shakespeare's day for a deformed person was "stigmatic." It denoted any one who had been stigmatised or burnt with iron (an ignominious punishment), and hence was employed to represent a person on whom nature had set a mark of deformity. Thus in the Third Part of Henry VI. (ii. 2) Queen Margaret says--

"But thou art neither like thy sire nor dam; But like a foul misshapen stigmatic, Marked by the destinies to be avoided, As venom toads, or lizards' dreadful stings."

Again in the Second Part of Henry VI. (v. 1) young Clifford says to Richard--

"Foul stigmatic, that's more than thou canst tell."

In A Midsummer Night's Dream (v. 1) Oberon wards off degeneracy from the issue of the happy lovers by the following charm--

"And the blots of Nature's hand Shall not in their issue stand; Never mole, hare-lip nor scar, Nor mark prodigious, such as are Despised in nativity, Shall upon their children be."

Constant allusions to this subject occur in old writers, showing how strong was the belief of the early English on this point. King John (iv. 2) calls Hubert, the supposed murderer of Prince Arthur,--

"A fellow by the hand of Nature marked, Quoted and signed to do a deed of shame."

Concerning this adaptation of the mind to the deformity of the body Francis Bacon remarks: "Deformed persons are commonly even with Nature, for as Nature hath done ill by them so do they by Nature, being void of natural affection, and so they have their revenge on Nature."

The quaint old "Anatomist of Melancholy," Burton, seems but to paraphrase modern curers of degeneracy when, at the end of his chapter on the inheritance of defects, he remarks concerning this fetichistic notion: "So many several ways are we plagued and published for our father's defaults; in so much that as Fernelius truly saith: 'It is the greatest part of our felicity to be well born, and it were happy for human kind, if only such parents as are sound of body and mind should be suffered to marry.' An husbandman will sow none but the best and choicest seed upon his land, he will not rear a bull or an horse, except he be right shapen in all parts, or permit him to cover a mare, except he be well assured of his breed; we make choice of the best rams for our sheep, rear the neatest kine, and keep the best dogs, quanto id diligentius in procreandis liberis observandum! And how careful, then, should we be in begetting of our children! In former times some countries have been so chary in this behalf, so stern, that if a child were crooked or deformed in body or mind, they made him away; so did the Indians of old by the relation of Curtius, and many other well-governed commonwealths according to the discipline of those times. 'Heretofore in Scotland,' saith Hect Boethius, 'if any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and if by chance having some such disease she were found to be with child, she with her brood were buried alive'; and this was done for the common good, lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted. A severe doom, you will say, and not to be used amongst Christians, yet more to be looked into than it is. For now by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost free, from some grievous infirmity or other, when no choice is had, but still the eldest must marry, as so many stallions of the race; or if rich, be they fools or dizzards, lame or maimed, unable, intemperate, dissolute, exhaust through riot, as he said, they must be wise and able by inheritance. It comes to pass that our generation is corrupt, we have many weak persons both in body and mind, many feral diseases raging among us, crazed families; our fathers bad, and we are like to be worse."

This conception gradually developed into the widespread myth of a primevally perfect man through the natural operation of that psychological law whereby, as Macaulay remarks, society, constantly moving forward with eager speed, is as constantly looking backward with tender regret. They turn their eyes and see a lake where an hour before they were toiling through sand.

From this view came the belief that man as existing is degenerate. This degeneracy, while popularly charged to occult influences, was early ascribed by scientists to physical causes. Aristotle, as Osborn points out, appears to have recognised degeneration or the gradual decline of structures in form and usefulness, in his analysis of "movement" in connection with development. Degeneration is first met with as a term in an explanation of the origin of species by Buffon in the eighteenth century. The conception itself occurs in a criticism by Sylvius of Vesalius (1514-64), who had asserted that the anatomy of Galen could not have been founded upon the human body, because he had described an intermaxillary bone. This bone, Vesalius observed, is found in the lower animals but not in man. Sylvius (1614-72) defends Galen on the ground that though man had no intermaxillary bone at present this is no proof of its absence in Galen's time. "It is luxury, it is sensuality, which has gradually deprived man of this bone." This passage, as Osborn remarks, proves that the idea of degeneration of structures through disuse, as well as the idea of the inheritance of the effect of habit, or the "transmission of acquired characters," is a very ancient one. Sylvius, while here recognising factors of degeneracy, erred in considering disappearance of the intermaxillary bone, not reappearance, as degeneracy. He failed to recognise, moreover, the law of economy of growth by which one structure is sacrificed for another or for the organism as a whole. This law, indicated by Aristotle, but clearly outlined by Goethe in 1807, and Geoffroy St. Hilaire in 1818, underlies the physiological atrophies and hypertrophies which play such a part in degeneracy.

The Twelve Cæsars of Suetonius (that stud book of imperial degeneracy as it has been styled) stamps the decided impression on its readers that Hippocratian notions of degenerate heredity strongly permeated Roman thought, to revive in those Arabic, Italian, and British (Roger Bacon) thinkers who created the scientific phase of the revival of learning.

In the science of medicine, as developed by Hippocrates, the modern conception of degeneracy is evident. Hippocrates argues against the "sacred" nature of epilepsy, since it is a hereditary disease and hence comes under the operation of physical law. He furthermore points out, as did Aristotle, that epilepsy produced in the ancestor by traumatism and other physical causes may be inherited by the child.

As the degeneration phase of evolution was less antagonistic to the religious theory forced into biblical dogma by the Jesuit Suarez (in opposition to the evolutionary views of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas), being supported by biblical dicta (that when the fathers had eaten sour grapes the children's teeth were set on edge) and fetichistic folklore, it retained a dominance that the advanced phase lost. From the time of Hippocrates, psychiatry (the science devoted to mental disorders) continued to accumulate data of the origin and transmission of human defects. The impetus given the evolutionary explanation of these data by the seventeenth and eighteenth century biologists (Harvey, Buffon, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, and others) laid the foundation for the modern doctrine of degeneracy.

Continue reading Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results free in the Wunder reader →