TOXIC AGENTS
The toxic agents which influence the race toward degeneracy, exert that
deterioration in a mode which closely resembles that of the degenerative
powers of the acute and chronic contagions and infections. The acute
poisonings by these toxic agencies resemble the acute, nervous and other
exhaustion caused by the toxin of the germs underlying the infections and
contagions. The chronic conditions due to these toxic agents agree in many
respects with the chronic states produced by the infections and
contagions. The toxic agencies are divisible into those belonging to the
condiments, medicines, foods and beverages, and those arising from
occupations.
Tobacco is the most common, while alcohol and opium contend for second
place both as to use and as to deleterious effects. Alcohol has been
repeatedly charged with being _the_ factor in degeneracy. Statistics of
the first half of the present century seem to justify the conclusion that
it is apparently the most potent factor, yet these statistics as a rule
confound coincidence and cause, or effect and cause, or the vicious
circles thereby resulting, to a remarkable degree. There are but few
races in which alcohol has not been used and abused. The American
Indians[152] had tizwein, chica, and pulque long ere Columbus; the Tartars
and Russians, bouza, kvas, and kumyss; the South Sea Islanders ava and
toddy (from the cocoanut); the Tunisians, laymi. The vast majority of the
races of mankind have used alcoholic beverages. Each was called by a local
name and not by a loan word, a most demonstrable evidence of local origin.
Even the social insects (bees and ants) at times indulge in fruit
ferments. The claim, therefore, that alcohol is the product of high
civilisation, hence of recent origin, and hence peculiarly destructive, is
untenable. That excess in alcohol frequently occurs in degenerate stocks
is, however, undeniable. But as Krafft-Ebing, Kiernan, Spitzka and others
have shown, intolerance of alcohol is an expression of degeneracy. The
person intolerant of alcohol becomes either a total abstainer because of a
personal idiosyncrasy (like that which forbids certain people to eat
shell-fish lest nettle-rash occur), or because of parsimony, or for both
reasons combined. Such total abstainers leave degenerate offspring in
which degeneracy assumes the type of excess in alcohol as well as even
lower phases. The race tests of the deteriorating influence of alcohol are
practically valueless, nor are statistics concerning alcoholism in the
ancestry of degenerates of much more use. The enormous amount of idiocy,
for example, in the Scandinavian countries, charged by Huss, Langdon Down
and others to alcoholism in the parents, has been, by the most recent
researches, cut down by Roof to less than 7 per cent. Insane hospital
statistics vary to a like degree. Bad faith, however, is out of the
question in these statistics. Lack of analytic skill, and that dangerous
unscientific, canting, philanthropic tendency which rebels at statistics
unfavourable to preconceived sociologic theories, explain these
discrepancies. The ignoring of all but the alcoholic factor produces also
great elements of error. Kiernan[153] cites twenty-three cases in which
degenerate stocks were charged to alcoholic parentage, but which on
analysis proved to be due to a degenerative factor in the parents of which
alcoholism was merely an expression. Nearly all the offspring born after
inebriety were prematurely born, defective, epileptic, hysteric, insane,
idiots or criminals. Some few were healthy, apart from their intolerance
of alcohol. In eighteen cases both father and mother were alcoholists. The
fathers in four of these cases had been temperate, industrious, and
affectionate ere being sunstruck. Following this came periods of
irritability, excessive drinking and spendthriftiness. The mothers had
remained for some years after the fathers' breakdown free from the use of
alcohol, but were nervously exhausted from the strain. One became
depressed during pregnancy, was given gin for the depression, and the
habit persisted after the delivery. In the three other cases painful
menses developed during the nervous exhaustion. The popular prescription
for these, gin, was given, with the result of producing inebriety. In ten
cases skull injury to the father had like results on both mother and
father. In two cases the mother became a victim of painful menstruation
after a railroad accident; gin drinking, to relieve this, followed and
became a habit. The father's nervous system broke down under the strain
and both became inebriates. In two other cases nervous exhaustion from
typhoid and typhus fever produced the same outcome in inebriety on the
part of the father and mother. In the remaining cases the inebriety was an
expression of nerve exhaustion after various protracted infections. The
alcoholism in these cases was clearly an expression of the factors of race
deterioration producing degeneracy, and not its cause.
The influence of alcohol must therefore first be studied on the individual
to determine its value and method of action as a cause of race
deterioration. Careful medical researches have shown that alcohol produces
a nervous state, closely resembling that induced by the contagions and
infections, often accompanied with mental disturbance (delirium tremens
and acute types of insanity). The acute nervous state to which the term
alcoholism was applied by Magnus Huss has all the essential
characteristics of the nervous state due to the contagions and infections.
There is, however, a greater tendency to impotence and sterility in the
alcohol nervous state than in the others, and consequently a lesser
influence on race deterioration. The condition, moreover, has a tendency
to set into action degenerative tendencies latent in the liver and
kidneys. This action of alcohol on the liver and kidneys so interferes
with their functions as to produce the effect already described as
resulting in the contagions and infections from their toxins. Alcohol
exerts a similarly deteriorating influence on the antitoxin-forming
organs (especially on the testicles, ovaries and their appendages), to
that already described as exerted by the toxins of the contagions and
infections. To the direct toxic effects of alcohol are therefore added
results of imperfect liver and kidney action and defective strengthening
powers from deficient antitoxin secretion. Like all toxic agents, alcohol
interferes with the functions of the eye and ear nerves. Special weakness
thus created is transmissible to the offspring. The chronic type of
alcoholism may well be compared in its effect with chronic contagions.
There is, however, less tendency to infection with the microbes forming
pus. There is a greater tendency to deteriorating action on the nervous
system. There is in chronic alcoholism, as in syphilis, special tendency
to that formation of connective tissue which destroys organs. The chronic
mental disorders of chronic alcoholism resemble those of tuberculosis
except that the capricious state and exaltation are less frequent than the
suspicional tendency which is deeper, and takes the direction of delusions
of poisoning and insane jealousy. The last are due to the deteriorating
influence of alcohol on the generative organs. Alcohol may limit its
action to the central nervous system, and thus produce hereditary losses
of power. It causes changes in the peripheral nerves which in the
offspring find expression in spinal cord and brain disorder through
extension of the morbid process. But for its deteriorating effects on the
ovaries and testicles, alcohol would be a most serious social danger.
Through its action on the generative organs it tends to prevent the
survival of the unfit, rather than to develop degenerates.
Opium seems to be the Charybdis on which the human bark strikes when
escaping from the Scylla of alcohol. Its abuse as a narcotic is much
older, even among the English-speaking races, than is generally suspected.
Murrell, over ten years ago, demonstrated that the inhabitants of the fens
of Lincolnshire had long employed opium as a prophylactic against malaria.
The ratio of insanity in these regions proved to be very great. The same
conditions obtained in certain malarial regions of New Jersey and
Pennsylvania, where the use of strong infusions of poppy was common. The
statistics of Rush[154] as to opium-caused insanity in Pennsylvania,
indicate that the percentage of American opium abuses at the beginning of
the nineteenth century was very great. The drug differs in two serious
respects from alcohol. It is nearer in chemical composition to nerve
tissue, and the tendency to its use may be transmitted by the mother
directly to the foetus. This, as Bureau and Ringer have shown, receives
through the placenta from its opium-using mother a certain amount of
morphine. In consequence, the child in the first month of infancy must be
nourished on the milk of an opium-using woman, or given opium in some
other way lest it perish. To this fact Calkins[155] was the first to call
attention. His results were corroborated later by Hubbard; Kiernan, of
Chicago[156]; Erlenmeyer, of Berlin; F. B. Earle, of Chicago; Mattison, of
Brooklyn; Hughes, of St. Louis; and others. Amabile, of New York, showed
that not only were the children of opium-using mothers born with tendency
to the opium habit, but that the mothers aborted frequently with twins,
and that the children who survived were very liable to convulsions.
Independently of this factor the mental state produced by opium habit
resembles in many respects that of the lunatic, in that the victim of
opium is as unable to distinguish between his wishes and the facts, and
therefore often utters what appear to be sheer lies. Hence he is totally
unreliable and has taken a step in mental and moral degeneracy that, by
the ordinary laws of heredity, must greatly increase, unless corrected by
healthy atavism and training in the next generation. Opium is a more
dangerous factor of degeneracy than alcohol, since the opium user must be
in a continuous state of intoxication to carry on his usual avocation,
while abstinence is perfectly compatible with proper work on the part of
the drunkard. The opium habit is increased by the peculiar propaganda
carried on by the _habitues_ who justify their position by urging the use
of opium for any ailment, however minimal. Opium, like alcohol, causes
nervous exhaustion similar to, but greater than, that of the contagions
and infections. From the affinity of opium to nerve tissue, from its
tendency to stimulate the heart, thus causing increased blood supply to
the brain; from its action on the bowels and the increased resultant work
of the liver, this nervous state is much intensified. Opium does not have
as great tendencies to interfere with the structure of the ovary and
testicles as alcohol, hence the greater danger of the opium _habitue's_
children surviving. Opium, when smoked, stimulates the reproductive
apparatus, and thus would greatly increase the number of degenerates due
to this habit but for the defects due to the inheritance of the habit and
their consequences.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--ANTE-CHRISTIAN IRISH PIPES.]
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--ANTE-COLUMBIAN PIPES FROM SCULPTURE AT
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON.]
The origin of the use of tobacco is usually ascribed to the New World.
There is no doubt that immediately subsequent to the discovery of America,
the use of tobacco spread over the world, and that its employment by Sir
Walter Raleigh made it fashionable. It is certain, however, that the
Romans and Irish employed pipes for smoking long ere the Christian era
(Fig. 1), but the substances smoked were not tobacco but dried aromatic
leaves. The English before Columbus (Fig. 2) did the same. In Western Asia
historic botanical evidence leaves no doubt that tobacco was indigenous.
Tobacco from the East hence probably encountered tobacco from the West,
both currents meeting in Asia Minor. As with alcohol and opium the
statistic method generally adopted proves fallacious when applied to the
degenerative effects of tobacco. Study of its effects on the individual is
needed to determine its effects on the race. The most careful researches
show that the typical effects occur as a rule after long-continued use of
tobacco, sometimes not until twenty years or more. While many smokers
reach old age, many fail to live to old age because they are smokers. The
skin is the subject of itching and reddening, the nerves of taste are
blunted, and patches develop in the throat; loss of appetite, epigastric
fulness, pain, vomiting, and disturbance of bowel function are common.
Menstrual disturbance occurs in women. In female cigar-makers abortion and
pluriparity are frequent. The sexual appetite is impaired and sometimes
sterility and impotence occur; also disturbed heart action, palpitation,
rapid and intermitting pulse, precordial anxiety, weakness, faintness and
collapse, with sclerosis of the coronary arteries of the heart and left
ventricular hypertrophy. Cigars and cigarettes produce irritation of the
nose, mucous membrane, diminished smell, chronic hyperaemia of the
epiglottis and larynx, and sometimes of the trachea and bronchi
predisposing to consumption. Nicotine amblyopia, or sight weakness, is
common, with central disturbances of the field of vision and with
colour-weakness of sight. Often there is disorder of the ear tubes and
congestion of drum, with loss of power of the hearing nerves, and
consequent noises in the ear. The central nervous system is affected. In
high schools, non-smokers get on better than smokers. Children from 9 to
15 years of age exhibit less intelligence, laziness, or other degenerative
tendencies. Adults have head-pressure, sleeplessness, or drowsy stupor,
depression, apathy, and dizziness. There may also be ataxic symptoms,
paretic weakness of bowel and bladder, trembling and spasms. Tobacco
insanities are comparatively rare in smokers, but are common in snuffers
and still oftener in chewers.[157] In the precursory stage, which lasts
about three months, there is general uneasiness, restlessness, anxiety,
sleeplessness, and mental depression, often of a religious type. After
this occurs precordial anxiety, and finally the psychosis proper
consisting of three stages: 1. Hallucinations of all senses, suicidal
tendency, depression of spirits, attacks of fright with tendency to
violence and sleeplessness. 2. Exhilaration, slight emotional exaltation,
agreeable hallucinations after from two to four weeks' relaxation, again
followed by excitement. 3. The intervals between exaltation and depression
diminish, the patient becomes irritable, but otherwise not alive to his
surroundings, and perception and attention are lessened. The patient may
be cured in five or six months if he stop tobacco during the first stage.
In a year or so he may recover during the second stage. After the third
stage the disease is frequently incurable. As the patient often becomes
(especially by the use of the cigarette) an _habitue_ ere puberty, the
proper development and balance of the sexual and intellectual system is
checked. These patients break down mentally and physically between 14 and
25. The moral delinquencies, other than sexual, are often an especial
tendency to forgery and deceit of parents. Frequently the insanity of
puberty (hebephrenia) is precipitated by tobacco. The cigarette, if used
moderately, may be a sedative, but as used is a stimulant, and is often
made of spoiled tobacco, resembling in reaction morphine, and on animals
acting in a somewhat similar manner. As tobacco turns the salivary glands
(which are concerned in digestion of starch) into excretory glands, it
leads to imperfect digestion of starch, to consequent irregular
fermentation in the bowel, thus at once furnishing a culture medium for
microbes, to form more violent toxins from, and also creating leucomaines,
to interfere especially with a nervous system overstimulated by nicotine.
This is one great reason why those who snuff and chew tobacco more
frequently become insane from tobacco than smokers, albeit these last are
not exempt.
Statistics from the female employes of the Spanish, French, Cuban, and
American tobacco factories, while defective and somewhat vitiated by the
co-existence of other conditions producing degeneracy, support the opinion
that the maternal tobacco habit (whether intentional or the result of an
atmosphere consequent on occupation) is the cause of frequent
miscarriage, of high infantile mortality, of defective children, and of
infantile convulsions.[158]
Tobacco, therefore, in its influence on the paternal and maternal
organism, exhausts the nervous system so that an acquired neurosis results
in such a way as to be transmissible.
Professional tea-tasters have long been known to suffer from nervous
symptoms; very early in the practice of their occupation the head pressure
symptoms of neurasthenia occur. Tremor also occurs early. While changes in
the optic nerve have not been demonstrated beyond a doubt, still eye
disorders have been observed in the pauper tea-drinkers of the United
States and in the tea-tasters of Russia, thus indicating that similar
changes to those produced by tobacco and alcohol are likely to occur in
the optic nerve from tea. Bullard[159] has found that tea has a cumulative
effect. In his experience toxic effects are not produced by less than five
cups daily. The symptoms manifested are those of nervous excitement
resembling hysteria, at times almost amounting to fury; nervous dyspepsia;
rapid and irregular heart action; neuralgia of the heart; helmet-like
sensation on the head, and tenderness along the spine. James Wood,[160] of
Brooklyn, found that 10 per cent. of those under treatment at the city
hospitals exhibited similar symptoms. Of these 69 per cent. were females.
Every symptom ascribed by Bullard to tea was found by Wood in his cases,
who also found that the women manifested irregularities in menstruation
of neurasthenic or hysteria type. He has found these symptoms to be
produced by one-half of the quantity of tea charged with these effects by
Bullard. The _Lancet_[161] several years ago, from an editorial analysis
of the effects of tea-tippling, took the position that in no small degree
nervous symptoms occurring in children during infancy were due to the
practice of the mothers, both of the working and society class, indulging
in the excessive use of tea, the excess being judged by its effects on the
individual and not by the amount taken. Convulsions and resultant
infantile paralysis were frequently noticed among the children of these
tea-tipplers. Observations among the factory population and the workers in
the clothing sweating-shops show that tea neurasthenia, presenting all the
ordinary symptoms of nervous exhaustion, is especially common among these.
It is evident that tea produces a grave form of neurasthenia readily
transmissible to descendants. In addition to its effects directly upon the
nervous system, tea tends to check both stomach and bowel digestion, and
thus increases the self-poisoning which is so prominent a cause,
consequence, and aggravation of these nervous conditions.
Coffee exerts a very similar action to that of tea, albeit the nervous
symptoms produced by it are usually secondary to the disturbances of the
stomach and bowel digestion. Coffee produces tremor, insomnia, nervous
dyspepsia, and helmet sensations. With the exception of certain districts
of the United States, coffee abuse is not carried to such an extent as
tea, albeit in these, as in some portions of Germany, the habit is an
excessive one. The conditions described result in Germany as frequently
as they do in the United States. Mendel[162] finds that in Germany coffee
inebriety is increasing and supplanting alcohol. Profound depression with
sleeplessness and frequent vertex headache are early symptoms. Strong
coffee will remove these temporarily, but it soon loses its effects, and
they recur. There is much tremor, especially of the hands. The heart's
action is rapid and irregular. Nervous dyspepsia is frequent. L. Bremer,
of St. Louis, Mo., has observed similar conditions among both Germans and
Americans there.
While coca took its place only recently among the toxic causes of
degeneracy, it was old as a factor in the degeneration of the Peruvian
long ere the discovery of America by Columbus. Forty-three years ago
Johnston[163] wrote that even Europeans in different parts of Peru had
fallen into the coca habit long practised by the Indians. A confirmed
chewer of coca is called a _coquero_, and he becomes more thoroughly a
slave to the leaf than the inveterate drunkard is to alcohol. Sometimes
the _coquero_ is overtaken by an irresistible craving, and betakes himself
for days together to the woods, and there indulges unrestrainedly in coca.
Young men of the best families of Peru are considered incurable when
addicted to this extreme degree of excess. They abandon white society, and
live in the woods or in Indian villages. In Peru the term white _coquero_
has the same sense as irreclaimable drunken tramp. The inveterate
_coquero_ has an unsteady gait, yellow skin, quivering lips, hesitant
speech, and general apathy. The drug has assumed an unusual prominence in
the field of degeneracy since the discovery of its alkaloid, cocaine.
Since then there has sprung into existence in both Europe and the
English-speaking countries the world over, a habit which, while much
over-estimated, is undoubtedly growing, and aggravating as well as
producing degeneracy. Many of the cases reported as due to cocaine are,
however, chargeable to the desire of the hysteric or neurasthenic to
secure a new sensation, or the desire on the part of the opium or whisky
_habitue_ to try a dodge for forgiveness by friends. The habit is very
frequently induced by patent medicines taken to cure catarrh by the
neurasthenic, or to cure nervousness by hysterics as well. As the
deformities of the nose passages predispose to what is called "catarrh,"
patent medicines for local application containing cocaine are frequently
employed in the treatment of this supposed constitutional disease, with
the result of aggravating the original degeneracy. As the youth under the
stress of puberty frequently ascribes all his ills to catarrh, he also
employs very frequently snuffs containing cocaine, and has his nervous
condition much aggravated thereby. Among the nostrums urged in the
newspapers and magazines for this condition, so often resultant on nerve
stress, is a certain notorious snuff containing 3 per cent. of cocaine.
From the description given by Johnson of the _coquero_ there can be no
doubt but tramps, errabund lunatics, and paupers result from this habit,
to give birth to degenerates in the next generation.
Lead has been found to produce in those exposed to its fumes a systemic
nervous exhaustion, characterised by local paralysis about the wrist as
well as the general symptoms of profound systemic nerve tire. This may
result, as Tanquerel des Planches[164] pointed out nearly half a century
ago, in acute insanity of the confusional type followed very often by
forms of mental disorder of a chronic type resembling paretic dementia. In
some cases the patient recovers from the acute insanity to suffer
thereafter from epilepsy. In other cases, as Kiernan has shown,[165] an
irritable suspicional condition results, in which the patient may live for
years, marry, and leave offspring. This last condition and the epileptic
are the most dangerous as to the production of degeneracy. As has already
been pointed out, the women employed in the pottery factories in Germany
suffer according to Rennert[166] from a form of lead poisoning which
produces decidedly degenerative effects upon the offspring. These women
had frequent abortions, often produced deaf-mutes, and very frequently
macrocephalic children.
Brass workers suffer from a very similar nervous condition to that
produced by lead. Hogden,[167] of Birmingham, called attention to the
grave forms of nervous exhaustion produced among brass-workers. The period
during which the patient is able to pursue the occupation without breaking
down is longer than that of the lead workers. Women, like men, are exposed
to this condition. The chief effect produced, so far as offspring have
been observed, is chiefly frequent abortions and infantile paralysis.
The occupations employing mercury, whether mining, mirror-making, or
gilding, produce forms of systemic nervous exhaustion in which the most
marked symptom (but less important from a sanitary standpoint) is a tremor
amounting at times almost to shaking-palsy. Like all other systemic
nervous exhaustions, the mercurial one may appear as degeneracy in the
offspring. The employment of women in match factories and tenement house
sweating shops is growing. The chief toxic effect of phosphorus is not the
localised jaw necrosis. This is but an evidence of the progressive system
saturation with phosphorus. It bears the same relation to the more
dangerous effects of phosphorus that "blue gum" does to the systemic
effects of lead.
Every condition arising from a toxic cause capable of producing profound
systemic nervous exhaustion in the ancestor, and especially the
ancestress, is likely to be transmitted as degeneracy to the descendant.
Undoubtedly with the growing tendency of woman to pass from the ill-paid
work of the seamstress to the better paid but dangerous occupations, a
certain seeming increase in degeneracy must result.