THE INCREASE OF INSANITY AND TUBERCULOSIS IN THE SOUTHERN NEGRO SINCE 1860, AND ITS ALLIANCE, AND SOME OF THE SUPPOSED CAUSES.

Abstract

The negroes of Georgia, and I might say of the Southern States, up to 1860 enjoyed remarkable mental and physical health, and they were almost entirely exempt from certain diseases to which they are now not only very susceptible, but are dying much more rapidly from these maladies than the whites; namely, insanity and consumption. While they may indicate much less susceptibility to miasmatic fevers, they are becoming more and more susceptible to them every year, and when we consider that heredity is one of the leading factors in the causation of insanity with the whites, and know that twenty-five or thirty years ago insanity and consumption in the negro could not have been attributed to hereditary predisposition save in a very few cases; couple this phenomenal increase in this race since 1860 with the inherited tendencies to these maladies, which we might say is just beginning to be manifested