HEREDITARY INSANITY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3770, 5 September 1907, Page 3

HEREDITARY INSANITY.

The Inspector-General of Hospitals (Dr Hay), in his report presented to Parliament on Tuesday afternoon, deals with the question of hereditary insanity. “ When we exult over the fact that only 988 of the native-born are insane,” he says, “and that this means a proportion of only one insane person in 613.6, let us remember that we should have had only one or two insane persons (which is giving a liberal allowance), and the proportion would have been from one in 3000 to one in 6000, if we had been sufficiently Utopian to have eliminated the factor of heredity in the past. Needless to pdd that such would have been impossible. “I do not suggest drastic measures, because the matter must be left largely to the public conscience. One is not sanguine enough to believe that in the selection of a life-partner as much care will be exercised as in the selection of stock, which of course, can be done dispassionately ; but surety it is the duty of interested persons to ascertain facts of personal and family history such as have to be disclosed before a life insurance company will accept a risk of even, a hundred pounds. If it profits a trading company to pay a medical fee to keep itself safe for so small a risk, surely it would pay to do something to avoid the great risk of persons marrying in ignorance, when enlightenment may encourage the union of healthy men and women. If public opinion were to see in this a matter for the action of the State, so much the better for the State. . “The value of an individual naturally leads to the next point to be considered —namely, the health of the mother and child. “Apart from inducing bodily disorders not directly associated with insanity, apart from mental enfeeblement due to arrested braindevelopment, apart from the fact that children comparatively seldom labour under mental disease, it may reasonably be presumed that the proper nourishment of infant both before and after birth must tell when moral and physical stress is encountered later in life and when toxaemic states have to be combated —especially if these be also a neuropathetic inheritance to contend with. From this standpoint alone, the work Dr. King has initiated in the South for the protection of the health of women and children is of great importance. He is demonstrating to the mother that she is assisting the Almighty miracle, the ultimate success of which depends on the manner in which she regulates her life, and that, once the child is born, she must not, for its lasting good and for her own good, deprive it of its birthright, the nourishment that was ordained for its use. The rapid development of the brain in the three months before birth and the three years after, when relatively it is out of all proportion to the body-weight, surety mark these out as critical periods with regard to ultimate mental stability. “ As to the growing child and school, one is pleased to note the modern tendency to pay some heed to the lesson of physiology ; and to trust that a happy augury may be divined in the Education and the various medical departments being under the same Minister.” “ It is true that the law of averages which rules vital statistics cannot be altered appreciably bj 7 the laws of Parliament, but when an analysis of our statistics demonstrates that we have two_ averages, a high average of insanit} - among our immigrants, and a low average among our own people—it is right to point this out lest the average be mingled in ignorance. We all know that the presumably responsible will continue to commit excesses, and that nature will con-

tinue to be revenged, that to warn persons gravitating towards pauperism, crime, and insanity, aeainst putting ‘ an enemy in tfieir mouths to steal away their.’brains'' is to cry in the wilderness ; but some efforts is necessary to prevent their sins being visited to the third and fourth generations.”

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If the statements of a correspondent to the Wellington ing himself “Disgusted,” are to be accepted,, he has been particularly unfortunate in his experiences while travelling through the colony. In the first place, he asserts that., when,. pne enters, the Union Shipping Company’s office at almost any hour of the day, he finds a crowd of passengers glaring fiercely at each other and at the unfortunate clerk behind the counter who is unsuccessfully striving to cope wjth the pressure of business. The fuming passengers are not served in rotation, and thus it happens that a person will sometimes enter and be at once attended to in advance of a dozen others who have been waiting an hour. This, says the writer, is especially noticeable if the late arrival is a lady. Then he complains that during a 10 hours’ trip from New Plymouth to Onehunga he was four times asked for his ticket which he had given up the first time of asking; this, he thinks, caused him to be looked upon with, suspicion by his fellow-passengers. In shipping a horse the other day, the writer was subjected to more inconvenience and annoyance than would be involved in shipping a team of elephants by any other line. Turning to railway travel, he asks is the Napier express ever in anything but an over-crowded state ? and are there ever enough carriages put on the trains at holiday times ? As to hotels, with the exception of two or three in the chief centres, he declares that all the hotels in New Zealand, especially in the country, are simply pot-houses, where, if a man does not drink, he is not wanted and is shown so. Summing up, he says that in New Zealand, one not only rias to pay through the nose for everything one gets, but has to go on his knees to some Jack-in-office to beg for it. “ And all this in a country which is boomed and advertised as an ideal one for travellers and tourists!’.’