A REPORT ON SOME HEREDITY STUDIES

Abstract

It is not my purpose to enter into a general discussion of heredity in mental disease. In the first place it is too complicated a subject and I do not feel that I know sufficient about it, even less than I thought since recently reviewing some of the literature and looking over my case material. My apology for publishing what follows is that some years ago several articles appeared in this JOURNAL, and at the interhospital conferences held by the New York State Hospital system, several papers were read in which much was made of Mendel’s laws in connection with the psychoses. In the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INSANITY for October of 1911, Rosanoff and Orr1 make this statement: “The neuropathic constitution is transmitted from generation to generation in the manner of a trait, which is in the Mendelian sense, recessive to the normal condition.” In another paper published in 1912, Rosanoff stated that studies made up to that time in heredity, furnished results “which seemed to justify the assumption that the full development and normal function of the mental faculties are dependent upon the presence in the germ plasm of a special determiner.” He further in this article makes the positive statement that in cases of simplex inheritance there is mental stability, the normal overshadowing the neuropathic taint, and that those of simplex inheritance differ from those of duplex merely by the power which they have of transmitting the neuropathic constitution to their offspring. He is quite vague as to what he means by neuropathic, but he does state that they may be looked on as biological features, analogous in their mode of origin and mode of transmission by heredity, to such features as blue eyes, fair skin, etc. Epilepsy, feeblemindedness, manic depressive insanity, dementia pr ecox, psychoneuroses, etc., seem to be regarded as neuropathic.