PEER DOCTOR’S SPEECH

Evening Star, Issue 22577, 19 February 1937, Page 2

PEER DOCTOR’S SPEECH

FIT AND UNFIT ** We are preventing the death o{ the unlit as the result- of our civi. nation, but we have not planned any adequate substitute to promqte the ht, jud the one hand, and see to it that wo take care of the inherently unfit and prevent them from vitiating the race,’ said Lord Dawson of Penn, in a recent speech in the House of Lords. “If we allow the policy of promoting the fit to affect our policy, and we turn to our social and intellectual services. 1 suggest that we have to make them more selective; that is, while securing for the child of average abilities every opportunity in the limited sphere of usefulness for which it is fit, we hav® to do everything we can to push forward the better and the'best. “ The administrative: ' difficulties might at first be great, but it we would, say, at the age of 15* put down a sieve and let. those pass through and go on to the next stage, and again at 16 or 17 put down another sieve and see how many get through it, and then take the final filtering, there is no money that it would not be worth our while to spend to push that filtrate forward. “The testing.,of the fit at each or these stages is not a thing to be determined just by an examination or a mere test of- the boy’s or girl’s mind, but ..it. must include also a study of ■Kheiiii* bodies and ’, their i,developjnent, nnd‘ a study oftheir character. ■ ' In other countries, 'ifit is found that a'boy or girt reaches a certain stage of mental fitness, say, at 15 or 16, and that boy or girl has not a physique equal to the standard that should exist, that child is turned back and given sufficient further physical training to make it fit, to make it pass through the requisite sieve. “ I want to make myself clear. It is only by pushing forward the fit by active measurse like that that, you will make up for the fact that you are .rendering Nature’s methods nugatoryYou are not putting anything in the place of what you are steadily taking away. . “ If you once get the fit forward, you will get a group of young leaders whom you will train,, no doubt in special schools, and once you get those leaders forward they will be a pattern and a model. They .will _ set the pace, they will set the fashion, and they will also influence the taste of the young community; those leaders will put their impress on those who follow, “ More than that, you get a process of collective maintenance, because like will attract like, and you will get tha healthy girls being married to tha healthy men; and you will.thereby get the good race. A great danger I see at the present moment -is; that we go on—rightly go on—rendering Nature’s methods nugatory, but we do not apply ourselves sufficiently seriously to a substitute in the shape of promoting tha fit. . . . s MENTAL DEFECTIVES. “ May I pass to the question of mental defectives ? There are 25p,000 mental defectives ,iu our community, sufficiently fit to hold their own economically In that existence, but unfit from the point of view of parents. It has been calculated that if one parent or two parents fire subject to this disease, the children born of them are liahla to be defective to the extent of onethird, and to the extent of onehalf the children will not be normallyminded. “That is a considerable figure when you have 250,000 such defectives in tha community. May I quote one _ outstanding case which shows graphically how easy it is to get the race vitiated ?. A woman who wasa mental defective, with a bad hereditary on that side, after two illegitimate children, had 15 children bom in wedlock. Of these, nine were mental defectives, and only two were normal. “ If these children were free to move about the community, if they were noli really incapable of looking after themselves —they have a greater freedom now after the age of 16—if 10 of these children should marry and produce families, it does not require much thought to realise to what extent the race would be vitiated, say, after 50 years. It might easily run into thousands. “ We doctors are always being exhorted to think in terms of prevention, and we are more and more striving to do so. We take sanitary measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases; we inoculate practically whole communities, schools, and other places in order to prevent the spread of disease and arrccst it at its outset. “ I ask in all reason why we should not use preventive measures to prevent the birth of children who are nob wanted, who are a misery to themselves, a misery to their parents, and damaging to the race.”