Heredity and eugenics in relation to insanity / by F.W. Mott.

  • Mott, F. W. (Frederick Walker), 1853-1926.
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Heredity and eugenics in relation to insanity / by F.W. Mott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to Insanity. Dr. F. W. Mott, F.R.S., Pathologist to the Condon County Asylums. Physician to Charing Cross Hospital. Allow me to thank the Eugenics Society for doing me the honour of asking me to fill the place of so distinguished a physician as Sir Wm. Osier, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. The subject of Heredity and Eugenics in relation to Insanity is one which I, as Pathologist to the London County Asylums, have been studying in a practical manner for many years, and the more deeply I consider the question the more I find there is to be done before we shall be safe in drawing ultimate conclusions regarding certain practical questions dealing with the prevention of insanity. The subject of Heredity in its broad aspect is one of national importance and interest, as it affects many social and legislative questions. The interest taken by the general public in the question of heredity is a sign of social progress. People are beginning to recognise the truth of Professor Arthur Thomson’s dictum: “The present is the child of the past; our start in life is no haphazard affair, but is vigorously determined by our parentage and ancestry; all kinds of inborn characteristics may be transmitted from generation to generation.” All the modern doctrines of Human Heredity were foreshadowed by the ancient philosopher Lucretius, who, in de serum naturce, says : “ Some¬ times, too, the children may spring up like the grandfathers, and often re¬ semble the forms of their grandfather’s fathers, because the parents often keep concealed in their bodies many first beginnings mixed in many ways, which, first proceeding from the original stock, one father hands down to the next father, and then proceeding from them Venus produces forms after a manifold chance, and repeats not only the features but the voice and hair of forefathers, and the female sex equally springs from the father’s and males go forth equally from the mother’s body, since these distinctions no more proceed from the fixed seed of one or other parent, than our face and bodies and limbs. Again we perceive that the mind is begotten along with the body and grows up together with it, and grows old along with it.”