Medicine: Sterilization Flayed

In Oklahoma three weeks ago a half-dozen jailbirds ran away from prison to escape sterilization provided by law. In California last summer the daughter of the late great Inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt failed to have two doctors jailed for spaying her under her mother’s orders (TIME, Aug. 31).* Twenty-five other States, two Canadian provinces, one Mexican state, one Swiss canton, and five European countries have laws permitting or ordering the sterilization of criminals and mentally incompetent persons. In general, the effort is to prevent transmission of evil to children and children’s children.

But last week a learned committee of the American Neurological Association, after long investigation and study of the inheritance of mental diseases,† flatly declared that “most of the legislation which has been enacted so far is based more upon a desire to elevate the human race than upon proven facts. . . . Neither psychiatry nor human genetics approach at present the status of exact sciences.”

To show that madness may breed genius, the neurologists, headed by Dr. Abraham Myerson of Boston, cited the following admired men, more or less mad children of more or less mad parents: Hans Christian Andersen, Balzac, Beethoven, Bonaparte, Byron, Frederick the Great, Michelangelo, Newton, Poe, Swedenborg, Swift, Tolstoy.

The neurologists offered definite recommendations: “1) Our knowledge of human genetics has not the precision nor amplitude which would warrant the sterilization of people who themselves are normal in order to prevent the appearance, in their descendants, of manic-depressive psychosis, dementia praecox, feeblemindedness, epilepsy, criminal conduct or any of the conditions which we have had under consideration. . . .

“2) Particularly do we wish to emphasize that there is at present no sound scientific basis for sterilization on account of immorality or character defect. . . .

“3) Any law concerning sterilization passed in the United States under the present state of knowledge should be voluntary and regulatory rather than compulsory. . . .

“4) Any law concerning sterilization should be applicable not only to patients in State institutions but also to those in private institutions and those at large in the community. . . .

“5) The essential machinery for administering any law in regard to sterilization should be one or several boards composed chiefly of persons who have had especial training and experience in the problems involved. . . .

“6) Adequate legal protection for the members of such a board, and for the surgeons carrying out the recommendations, should be secured by statute.”

Such a board of experts would recommend sterilization only for especially selected cases of

1) Huntington’s chorea, hereditary optic atrophy, familial cases of Friedreich’s ataxia, and certain other disabling degenerative diseases recognized to be hereditary.

2) Feeblemindedness of familial type.

3) Dementia praecox (schizophrenia).

4) Manic-depressive psychosis.

5) Epilepsy.

For the feeble-minded the neurologists have a last, sympathetic word: “In a world which has much low-grade work to be done, there is still room for the people of low-grade mentality of good character.”

* Last week Mrs. Cooper Hewitt continued to avoid extradition from New Jersey to stand trial in California for causing mayhem to her daughter. † Eugenic Sterilization—Committee of the American Neurological Association—Macmillan ($3).