CHAPTER VI. Toxic Agents

TOXIC AGENTS

The toxic agents which influence the race toward degeneracy, exert that deterioration in a mode which closely resembles that of the degenerative powers of the acute and chronic contagions and infections. The acute poisonings by these toxic agencies resemble the acute, nervous and other exhaustion caused by the toxin of the germs underlying the infections and contagions. The chronic conditions due to these toxic agents agree in many respects with the chronic states produced by the infections and contagions. The toxic agencies are divisible into those belonging to the condiments, medicines, foods and beverages, and those arising from occupations.

Tobacco is the most common, while alcohol and opium contend for second place both as to use and as to deleterious effects. Alcohol has been repeatedly charged with being the factor in degeneracy. Statistics of the first half of the present century seem to justify the conclusion that it is apparently the most potent factor, yet these statistics as a rule confound coincidence and cause, or effect and cause, or the vicious circles thereby resulting, to a remarkable degree. There are but few races in which alcohol has not been used and abused. The American Indians had tizwein, chica, and pulque long ere Columbus; the Tartars and Russians, bouza, kvas, and kumyss; the South Sea Islanders ava and toddy (from the cocoanut); the Tunisians, laymi. The vast majority of the races of mankind have used alcoholic beverages. Each was called by a local name and not by a loan word, a most demonstrable evidence of local origin.

Even the social insects (bees and ants) at times indulge in fruit ferments. The claim, therefore, that alcohol is the product of high civilisation, hence of recent origin, and hence peculiarly destructive, is untenable. That excess in alcohol frequently occurs in degenerate stocks is, however, undeniable. But as Krafft-Ebing, Kiernan, Spitzka and others have shown, intolerance of alcohol is an expression of degeneracy. The person intolerant of alcohol becomes either a total abstainer because of a personal idiosyncrasy (like that which forbids certain people to eat shell-fish lest nettle-rash occur), or because of parsimony, or for both reasons combined. Such total abstainers leave degenerate offspring in which degeneracy assumes the type of excess in alcohol as well as even lower phases. The race tests of the deteriorating influence of alcohol are practically valueless, nor are statistics concerning alcoholism in the ancestry of degenerates of much more use. The enormous amount of idiocy, for example, in the Scandinavian countries, charged by Huss, Langdon Down and others to alcoholism in the parents, has been, by the most recent researches, cut down by Roof to less than 7 per cent. Insane hospital statistics vary to a like degree. Bad faith, however, is out of the question in these statistics. Lack of analytic skill, and that dangerous unscientific, canting, philanthropic tendency which rebels at statistics unfavourable to preconceived sociologic theories, explain these discrepancies. The ignoring of all but the alcoholic factor produces also great elements of error. Kiernan cites twenty-three cases in which degenerate stocks were charged to alcoholic parentage, but which on analysis proved to be due to a degenerative factor in the parents of which alcoholism was merely an expression. Nearly all the offspring born after inebriety were prematurely born, defective, epileptic, hysteric, insane, idiots or criminals. Some few were healthy, apart from their intolerance of alcohol. In eighteen cases both father and mother were alcoholists. The fathers in four of these cases had been temperate, industrious, and affectionate ere being sunstruck. Following this came periods of irritability, excessive drinking and spendthriftiness. The mothers had remained for some years after the fathers' breakdown free from the use of alcohol, but were nervously exhausted from the strain. One became depressed during pregnancy, was given gin for the depression, and the habit persisted after the delivery. In the three other cases painful menses developed during the nervous exhaustion. The popular prescription for these, gin, was given, with the result of producing inebriety. In ten cases skull injury to the father had like results on both mother and father. In two cases the mother became a victim of painful menstruation after a railroad accident; gin drinking, to relieve this, followed and became a habit. The father's nervous system broke down under the strain and both became inebriates. In two other cases nervous exhaustion from typhoid and typhus fever produced the same outcome in inebriety on the part of the father and mother. In the remaining cases the inebriety was an expression of nerve exhaustion after various protracted infections. The alcoholism in these cases was clearly an expression of the factors of race deterioration producing degeneracy, and not its cause.

The influence of alcohol must therefore first be studied on the individual to determine its value and method of action as a cause of race deterioration. Careful medical researches have shown that alcohol produces a nervous state, closely resembling that induced by the contagions and infections, often accompanied with mental disturbance (delirium tremens and acute types of insanity). The acute nervous state to which the term alcoholism was applied by Magnus Huss has all the essential characteristics of the nervous state due to the contagions and infections. There is, however, a greater tendency to impotence and sterility in the alcohol nervous state than in the others, and consequently a lesser influence on race deterioration. The condition, moreover, has a tendency to set into action degenerative tendencies latent in the liver and kidneys. This action of alcohol on the liver and kidneys so interferes with their functions as to produce the effect already described as resulting in the contagions and infections from their toxins. Alcohol exerts a similarly deteriorating influence on the antitoxin-forming organs (especially on the testicles, ovaries and their appendages), to that already described as exerted by the toxins of the contagions and infections. To the direct toxic effects of alcohol are therefore added results of imperfect liver and kidney action and defective strengthening powers from deficient antitoxin secretion. Like all toxic agents, alcohol interferes with the functions of the eye and ear nerves. Special weakness thus created is transmissible to the offspring. The chronic type of alcoholism may well be compared in its effect with chronic contagions. There is, however, less tendency to infection with the microbes forming pus. There is a greater tendency to deteriorating action on the nervous system. There is in chronic alcoholism, as in syphilis, special tendency to that formation of connective tissue which destroys organs. The chronic mental disorders of chronic alcoholism resemble those of tuberculosis except that the capricious state and exaltation are less frequent than the suspicional tendency which is deeper, and takes the direction of delusions of poisoning and insane jealousy. The last are due to the deteriorating influence of alcohol on the generative organs. Alcohol may limit its action to the central nervous system, and thus produce hereditary losses of power. It causes changes in the peripheral nerves which in the offspring find expression in spinal cord and brain disorder through extension of the morbid process. But for its deteriorating effects on the ovaries and testicles, alcohol would be a most serious social danger. Through its action on the generative organs it tends to prevent the survival of the unfit, rather than to develop degenerates.

Opium seems to be the Charybdis on which the human bark strikes when escaping from the Scylla of alcohol. Its abuse as a narcotic is much older, even among the English-speaking races, than is generally suspected. Murrell, over ten years ago, demonstrated that the inhabitants of the fens of Lincolnshire had long employed opium as a prophylactic against malaria. The ratio of insanity in these regions proved to be very great. The same conditions obtained in certain malarial regions of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the use of strong infusions of poppy was common. The statistics of Rush as to opium-caused insanity in Pennsylvania, indicate that the percentage of American opium abuses at the beginning of the nineteenth century was very great. The drug differs in two serious respects from alcohol. It is nearer in chemical composition to nerve tissue, and the tendency to its use may be transmitted by the mother directly to the foetus. This, as Bureau and Ringer have shown, receives through the placenta from its opium-using mother a certain amount of morphine. In consequence, the child in the first month of infancy must be nourished on the milk of an opium-using woman, or given opium in some other way lest it perish. To this fact Calkins was the first to call attention. His results were corroborated later by Hubbard; Kiernan, of Chicago; Erlenmeyer, of Berlin; F. B. Earle, of Chicago; Mattison, of Brooklyn; Hughes, of St. Louis; and others. Amabile, of New York, showed that not only were the children of opium-using mothers born with tendency to the opium habit, but that the mothers aborted frequently with twins, and that the children who survived were very liable to convulsions. Independently of this factor the mental state produced by opium habit resembles in many respects that of the lunatic, in that the victim of opium is as unable to distinguish between his wishes and the facts, and therefore often utters what appear to be sheer lies. Hence he is totally unreliable and has taken a step in mental and moral degeneracy that, by the ordinary laws of heredity, must greatly increase, unless corrected by healthy atavism and training in the next generation. Opium is a more dangerous factor of degeneracy than alcohol, since the opium user must be in a continuous state of intoxication to carry on his usual avocation, while abstinence is perfectly compatible with proper work on the part of the drunkard. The opium habit is increased by the peculiar propaganda carried on by the habitués who justify their position by urging the use of opium for any ailment, however minimal. Opium, like alcohol, causes nervous exhaustion similar to, but greater than, that of the contagions and infections. From the affinity of opium to nerve tissue, from its tendency to stimulate the heart, thus causing increased blood supply to the brain; from its action on the bowels and the increased resultant work of the liver, this nervous state is much intensified. Opium does not have as great tendencies to interfere with the structure of the ovary and testicles as alcohol, hence the greater danger of the opium habitué's children surviving. Opium, when smoked, stimulates the reproductive apparatus, and thus would greatly increase the number of degenerates due to this habit but for the defects due to the inheritance of the habit and their consequences.

The origin of the use of tobacco is usually ascribed to the New World. There is no doubt that immediately subsequent to the discovery of America, the use of tobacco spread over the world, and that its employment by Sir Walter Raleigh made it fashionable. It is certain, however, that the Romans and Irish employed pipes for smoking long ere the Christian era (Fig. 1), but the substances smoked were not tobacco but dried aromatic leaves. The English before Columbus (Fig. 2) did the same. In Western Asia historic botanical evidence leaves no doubt that tobacco was indigenous. Tobacco from the East hence probably encountered tobacco from the West, both currents meeting in Asia Minor. As with alcohol and opium the statistic method generally adopted proves fallacious when applied to the degenerative effects of tobacco. Study of its effects on the individual is needed to determine its effects on the race. The most careful researches show that the typical effects occur as a rule after long-continued use of tobacco, sometimes not until twenty years or more. While many smokers reach old age, many fail to live to old age because they are smokers. The skin is the subject of itching and reddening, the nerves of taste are blunted, and patches develop in the throat; loss of appetite, epigastric fulness, pain, vomiting, and disturbance of bowel function are common. Menstrual disturbance occurs in women. In female cigar-makers abortion and pluriparity are frequent. The sexual appetite is impaired and sometimes sterility and impotence occur; also disturbed heart action, palpitation, rapid and intermitting pulse, precordial anxiety, weakness, faintness and collapse, with sclerosis of the coronary arteries of the heart and left ventricular hypertrophy. Cigars and cigarettes produce irritation of the nose, mucous membrane, diminished smell, chronic hyperæmia of the epiglottis and larynx, and sometimes of the trachea and bronchi predisposing to consumption. Nicotine amblyopia, or sight weakness, is common, with central disturbances of the field of vision and with colour-weakness of sight. Often there is disorder of the ear tubes and congestion of drum, with loss of power of the hearing nerves, and consequent noises in the ear. The central nervous system is affected. In high schools, non-smokers get on better than smokers. Children from 9 to 15 years of age exhibit less intelligence, laziness, or other degenerative tendencies. Adults have head-pressure, sleeplessness, or drowsy stupor, depression, apathy, and dizziness. There may also be ataxic symptoms, paretic weakness of bowel and bladder, trembling and spasms. Tobacco insanities are comparatively rare in smokers, but are common in snuffers and still oftener in chewers. In the precursory stage, which lasts about three months, there is general uneasiness, restlessness, anxiety, sleeplessness, and mental depression, often of a religious type. After this occurs precordial anxiety, and finally the psychosis proper consisting of three stages: 1. Hallucinations of all senses, suicidal tendency, depression of spirits, attacks of fright with tendency to violence and sleeplessness. 2. Exhilaration, slight emotional exaltation, agreeable hallucinations after from two to four weeks' relaxation, again followed by excitement. 3. The intervals between exaltation and depression diminish, the patient becomes irritable, but otherwise not alive to his surroundings, and perception and attention are lessened. The patient may be cured in five or six months if he stop tobacco during the first stage. In a year or so he may recover during the second stage. After the third stage the disease is frequently incurable. As the patient often becomes (especially by the use of the cigarette) an habitué ere puberty, the proper development and balance of the sexual and intellectual system is checked. These patients break down mentally and physically between 14 and 25. The moral delinquencies, other than sexual, are often an especial tendency to forgery and deceit of parents. Frequently the insanity of puberty (hebephrenia) is precipitated by tobacco. The cigarette, if used moderately, may be a sedative, but as used is a stimulant, and is often made of spoiled tobacco, resembling in reaction morphine, and on animals acting in a somewhat similar manner. As tobacco turns the salivary glands (which are concerned in digestion of starch) into excretory glands, it leads to imperfect digestion of starch, to consequent irregular fermentation in the bowel, thus at once furnishing a culture medium for microbes, to form more violent toxins from, and also creating leucomaines, to interfere especially with a nervous system overstimulated by nicotine. This is one great reason why those who snuff and chew tobacco more frequently become insane from tobacco than smokers, albeit these last are not exempt.

Statistics from the female employés of the Spanish, French, Cuban, and American tobacco factories, while defective and somewhat vitiated by the co-existence of other conditions producing degeneracy, support the opinion that the maternal tobacco habit (whether intentional or the result of an atmosphere consequent on occupation) is the cause of frequent miscarriage, of high infantile mortality, of defective children, and of infantile convulsions.

Tobacco, therefore, in its influence on the paternal and maternal organism, exhausts the nervous system so that an acquired neurosis results in such a way as to be transmissible.

Professional tea-tasters have long been known to suffer from nervous symptoms; very early in the practice of their occupation the head pressure symptoms of neurasthenia occur. Tremor also occurs early. While changes in the optic nerve have not been demonstrated beyond a doubt, still eye disorders have been observed in the pauper tea-drinkers of the United States and in the tea-tasters of Russia, thus indicating that similar changes to those produced by tobacco and alcohol are likely to occur in the optic nerve from tea. Bullard has found that tea has a cumulative effect. In his experience toxic effects are not produced by less than five cups daily. The symptoms manifested are those of nervous excitement resembling hysteria, at times almost amounting to fury; nervous dyspepsia; rapid and irregular heart action; neuralgia of the heart; helmet-like sensation on the head, and tenderness along the spine. James Wood, of Brooklyn, found that 10 per cent. of those under treatment at the city hospitals exhibited similar symptoms. Of these 69 per cent. were females. Every symptom ascribed by Bullard to tea was found by Wood in his cases, who also found that the women manifested irregularities in menstruation of neurasthenic or hysteria type. He has found these symptoms to be produced by one-half of the quantity of tea charged with these effects by Bullard. The Lancet several years ago, from an editorial analysis of the effects of tea-tippling, took the position that in no small degree nervous symptoms occurring in children during infancy were due to the practice of the mothers, both of the working and society class, indulging in the excessive use of tea, the excess being judged by its effects on the individual and not by the amount taken. Convulsions and resultant infantile paralysis were frequently noticed among the children of these tea-tipplers. Observations among the factory population and the workers in the clothing sweating-shops show that tea neurasthenia, presenting all the ordinary symptoms of nervous exhaustion, is especially common among these. It is evident that tea produces a grave form of neurasthenia readily transmissible to descendants. In addition to its effects directly upon the nervous system, tea tends to check both stomach and bowel digestion, and thus increases the self-poisoning which is so prominent a cause, consequence, and aggravation of these nervous conditions.

Coffee exerts a very similar action to that of tea, albeit the nervous symptoms produced by it are usually secondary to the disturbances of the stomach and bowel digestion. Coffee produces tremor, insomnia, nervous dyspepsia, and helmet sensations. With the exception of certain districts of the United States, coffee abuse is not carried to such an extent as tea, albeit in these, as in some portions of Germany, the habit is an excessive one. The conditions described result in Germany as frequently as they do in the United States. Mendel finds that in Germany coffee inebriety is increasing and supplanting alcohol. Profound depression with sleeplessness and frequent vertex headache are early symptoms. Strong coffee will remove these temporarily, but it soon loses its effects, and they recur. There is much tremor, especially of the hands. The heart's action is rapid and irregular. Nervous dyspepsia is frequent. L. Bremer, of St. Louis, Mo., has observed similar conditions among both Germans and Americans there.

While coca took its place only recently among the toxic causes of degeneracy, it was old as a factor in the degeneration of the Peruvian long ere the discovery of America by Columbus. Forty-three years ago Johnston wrote that even Europeans in different parts of Peru had fallen into the coca habit long practised by the Indians. A confirmed chewer of coca is called a coquero, and he becomes more thoroughly a slave to the leaf than the inveterate drunkard is to alcohol. Sometimes the coquero is overtaken by an irresistible craving, and betakes himself for days together to the woods, and there indulges unrestrainedly in coca. Young men of the best families of Peru are considered incurable when addicted to this extreme degree of excess. They abandon white society, and live in the woods or in Indian villages. In Peru the term white coquero has the same sense as irreclaimable drunken tramp. The inveterate coquero has an unsteady gait, yellow skin, quivering lips, hesitant speech, and general apathy. The drug has assumed an unusual prominence in the field of degeneracy since the discovery of its alkaloid, cocaine. Since then there has sprung into existence in both Europe and the English-speaking countries the world over, a habit which, while much over-estimated, is undoubtedly growing, and aggravating as well as producing degeneracy. Many of the cases reported as due to cocaine are, however, chargeable to the desire of the hysteric or neurasthenic to secure a new sensation, or the desire on the part of the opium or whisky habitué to try a dodge for forgiveness by friends. The habit is very frequently induced by patent medicines taken to cure catarrh by the neurasthenic, or to cure nervousness by hysterics as well. As the deformities of the nose passages predispose to what is called "catarrh," patent medicines for local application containing cocaine are frequently employed in the treatment of this supposed constitutional disease, with the result of aggravating the original degeneracy. As the youth under the stress of puberty frequently ascribes all his ills to catarrh, he also employs very frequently snuffs containing cocaine, and has his nervous condition much aggravated thereby. Among the nostrums urged in the newspapers and magazines for this condition, so often resultant on nerve stress, is a certain notorious snuff containing 3 per cent. of cocaine. From the description given by Johnson of the coquero there can be no doubt but tramps, errabund lunatics, and paupers result from this habit, to give birth to degenerates in the next generation.

Lead has been found to produce in those exposed to its fumes a systemic nervous exhaustion, characterised by local paralysis about the wrist as well as the general symptoms of profound systemic nerve tire. This may result, as Tanquerel des Planches pointed out nearly half a century ago, in acute insanity of the confusional type followed very often by forms of mental disorder of a chronic type resembling paretic dementia. In some cases the patient recovers from the acute insanity to suffer thereafter from epilepsy. In other cases, as Kiernan has shown, an irritable suspicional condition results, in which the patient may live for years, marry, and leave offspring. This last condition and the epileptic are the most dangerous as to the production of degeneracy. As has already been pointed out, the women employed in the pottery factories in Germany suffer according to Rennert from a form of lead poisoning which produces decidedly degenerative effects upon the offspring. These women had frequent abortions, often produced deaf-mutes, and very frequently macrocephalic children.

Brass workers suffer from a very similar nervous condition to that produced by lead. Hogden, of Birmingham, called attention to the grave forms of nervous exhaustion produced among brass-workers. The period during which the patient is able to pursue the occupation without breaking down is longer than that of the lead workers. Women, like men, are exposed to this condition. The chief effect produced, so far as offspring have been observed, is chiefly frequent abortions and infantile paralysis.

The occupations employing mercury, whether mining, mirror-making, or gilding, produce forms of systemic nervous exhaustion in which the most marked symptom (but less important from a sanitary standpoint) is a tremor amounting at times almost to shaking-palsy. Like all other systemic nervous exhaustions, the mercurial one may appear as degeneracy in the offspring. The employment of women in match factories and tenement house sweating shops is growing. The chief toxic effect of phosphorus is not the localised jaw necrosis. This is but an evidence of the progressive system saturation with phosphorus. It bears the same relation to the more dangerous effects of phosphorus that "blue gum" does to the systemic effects of lead.

Every condition arising from a toxic cause capable of producing profound systemic nervous exhaustion in the ancestor, and especially the ancestress, is likely to be transmitted as degeneracy to the descendant. Undoubtedly with the growing tendency of woman to pass from the ill-paid work of the seamstress to the better paid but dangerous occupations, a certain seeming increase in degeneracy must result.