A TERRIBLE RECORD.

Waikato Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2212, 11 September 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

A TERRIBLE RECORD.

Marriages entered into without due regard to phyvsiological conditions are only too frequently matters for observation to family physicians. Intermarriages among hereditary inebriates are, perhaps, among the most copious and melancholy examples. An observed case, recorded by the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Inebriety, affords a striking example of this : ♦• The ancestors of A. B. were Irish, and inebriates. Owing to a rise in real estate the («on became wealthy. He was talented and a paroxysmal inebriate at 2G years of ago. He married a pious woman, having neurotic ancestors, in spite of the protest of the family physician. Seven children followed this marriage ; two died in infancy of convulsions ; the third became insane at puberty, and is now in an insane asylum, hopelessly incurable ; the fourth grew to manhood, and is now an inebriate pauper, and criminal, and has been in prison five out of the last eight years ; the fifth became the wife of a wealthy man. and, in a paroxysm of inebriate insanity, killed her child, poisoned her husband, and then committed suicide. The sixth is a low dealer in spirits and a petty criminal, who has repeatedly been punished for crime. The seventh, after a short life of excess, died in a public hospital. The father became a paralytic, lost his property, and died in an asylum. The mother died in puerperal convulsions at 34." — British Medical Journal.