Library Collections: Document: Full Text

While the infant death-rate is known to be increased through institutions that receive without question all children brought to them, it is more of a question, or at least one that is more difficult to answer definitely, whether or not their influence tends to increase the number of illegitimate and abandoned infants. Lax morals and open foundling hospitals usually are found together, but it is not so easy to demonstrate the causal influence of the institutions in pro-ducing laxness of morals, though that they have such an influence is usually believed. The extreme facility and secrecy with which a child could be disposed of to French foundling hospitals of the older type is alleged to have had this result. The author's own observation leads him to think that foundling hospitals of the kind usual in America, because of the high death-rate already mentioned, tend to exterminate rather than to multiply the progeny of unfit stock.

A distinct influence upon the quantity and quality of the population is had by those institutions that bring defectives together to be trained, and after training them for self-support, encourage them to marry and to intermarry. This is, of course, most noticeable with the deaf because of the nature of their defect. It does not by any means incapacitate them for self-support, while at the same time it makes the companionship of deaf with deaf especially congenial. The congregate system of education of the deaf has brought them together in a way calculated to promote extensive acquaintance, and sign language tends to make them a peculiar people. It thus comes about that the institutions for the education of the deaf become very definite factors in promoting the propagation of deaf-mutism through inheritance. The latest educational tendency, and one favored by Dr. Howe, is to abandon the sign language to a considerable extent, and to encourage as far as possible the education of the deaf in day schools. This tends to assimilate them with the ordinary population, and their defect is more likely to prove a bar to marriage than under the conditions of boarding-schools. In general it may be said that the managers of charitable institutions do not sufficiently discourage marriage among the dependent and defective classes. The duty of being childless is not one they try to impose upon dependents.

In 1893 Ritchie suggested as a possible beginning of the work of making the definition of a mésalliance scientific, that all persons receiving a marriage license should be required to present a medical certificate giving evidence of freedom from a hereditary tendency to insanity. (23) Since then several states have passed such laws. In 1899 Michigan forbade the marriage of insane and idiotic persons and persons afflicted with syphilis and gonorrhoea and not cured. The law of Connecticut, passed in 1902, forbids the marriage of epileptics and imbeciles under a penalty of three years' imprisonment, with a penalty for other persons aiding such a marriage, and forbids illegitimate intercourse with a defective woman under equally heavy penalties. Indiana also forbids the issuance of a license not only to imbeciles and insane, but also to indigents of five years' standing. (24)

(24) Ely, "Evolution of Industrial Society," p. 170 ff.; N. C. C., 1905, P. 694.

Members of the medical profession frequently recommend castration as a punishment for certain offences, and as a method of treatment for "sexual perverts." Dr. Kerlin, in addressing the Association of Medical Officers of Institutions for the Feeble-minded, said; --

"While considering the help that advanced surgery is to give us, I will refer to a conviction that I have, that life-long salutary results to many of our boys and girls would be realized if before adolescence the procreative organs were removed. My experience extends to only a single case to confirm this conviction; but when I consider the great benefit that this young woman has received, the entire arrest of an epileptic tendency, as well as the removal of inordinate desires which made her an offence to the community; when I see the tranquil, well-ordered life she is leading, her usefulness and industry in the circle in which she moves, and know that surgery has been her salvation from vice and degradation, I am deeply thankful to the benevolent lady whose loyalty to science and comprehensive charity made this operation possible." "Whose state," he asks further on, "shall be the first to legalize oöphorectomy and orchitomia for the relief and cure of radical depravity?" (25)

Indiana appears to have been the first state to apply this. remedy. In 1901 a law was passed providing that upon the recommendation of certain physicians the operation necessary to sterilization should be performed upon criminals adjudged to be unfit to procreate. Dr. H. C. Sharp of the Indiana Reformatory reports that besides six prisoners operated upon under the authority of the law, two hundred and seventeen others were so treated at their own request. (26)