2. The great difference in the capacity for bearing children between the primitive and civilized races depends only in part on the lessened fitness of the latter due to the increase of skilled assistance.
3. Incapacity for bearing children can be acquired; it develops, however, abundantly on the grounds of a congenital predisposition.
4. In so far as the latter is the case, obstetrics contributes towards the diffusion of this incapacity.
5. The most serious obstacles to delivery are effected by deformities of the pelvis, in at least 90% of which heredity plays a part. In this connection, rickets, the predisposition to which is inherited, takes the foremost place.
6. German medical statistics make it appear probable that incapacity to bear children is on the increase.
7. Medical help in childbirth brings, undoubtedly, numerical advantage to the race, but it endangers the quality of the race in other ways than through the fostering of unfitness for bearing.
8. The danger of the increase of incapacity for bearing through the increase of assistance in childbirth can be combatted:--
(_a_) Through the renunciation of descendants by women unfitted to bear children.
(_b_) Through an energetic campaign against rickets, to which only the predisposition can be inherited.
(_c_) Through the permeation of obstetrics with the spirit of eugenics, so that the obstetrician no longer proceeds according to a settled rule (living mother and living child), but in each separate case takes into consideration the interests of the race.
HEREDITY AND EUGENICS IN RELATION TO INSANITY.
_Physician to Charing Cross Hospital and Pathologist to the London County Asylums._
What is insanity? Every case of insanity is a biological problem, the solution of which depends upon a knowledge of what a man was born with--Nature--and what has happened after birth--Nurture. The increase of registered insanity in London; the causes of the increase. (1) The standard of insanity has been raised. (2) The increase of accommodation for reception of the insane. The diminishing death rate in asylums causing a progressive accumulation. The diminished number of recoveries. (3) The large proportion of old people admitted to asylums formerly in the infirmaries.