Heredity and Mental Diseases

Halting the 'sad degenerationist parade': medical concerns about heredity and racial degeneracy in New Zealand psychiatry, 1853-99.

Historians have focused on early twentieth-century positive eugenics in New Zealand In this article, I argue that the response came from a tradition of concern about heredity and white racial degeneracy, which extended beyond the British Empire. This article focuses on concerns about heredity at the Auckland Mental Hospital between 1850 and 1899, and contextualises these concerns in New Zealand...

Heredity of feeble-mindedness.

Mental Affections

a subject. The volume is divided into three parts, the first deals with the broad questions of morbid heredity; the evolution of and the determining causes of insanity. Part II is physiological and pathological, and the third and longer part deals the clinical symptomatology of diseases of the mind. As regards the vexed question of the transmission of acquired characters, as it affects disease,...

Critical periods in the development of social behavior in puppies.

PART OF A PROGRAiM for the study of heredity and social behavior in dogs, the author and his colleagues have made a thorough study of the development of social behavior in puppies, with the idea of finding out the times at which heredity was most likely to exert its effects. As we did so, we also observed that there were certain periods in which environmental factors were particularly likely to...

Blindness in schoolchildren: importance of heredity, congenital cataract, and prematurity.

Of 99 children in the Royal Blind School, Edinburgh (which serves Scotland and part of N E England), 15 had optic atrophy (hydrocephalus 4, intracranial haemorrhage 2, prematurity 2, fetal distress 2, birth asphyxia 2, cerebral atrophy 1, cardiac arrest during hernia operation 1, and leukaemia 1). Fourteen had congenital cataract, 12 congenital retinal aplasia (Leber's congenital amaurosis) and...