Eugenics Record Office. BULLETIN No. 10A - DNA Patent Database ...

THE SCOPE OF THE COMMITTEE’S WORK. 27
The first group of psychoses above named is called functional
because, if lesions accompany these mental disorders, they have not
yet been discovered by the pathologist but, if the theory that every
psychoses is based upon a neurosis becomes established, then the sharp
line of demarcation between the organic and the functional psychoses
disappears and, rather, one end of the scale represents the psychoses
accompanied by gross lesions and the other that accompanied by the
more minute lesions.
Dr. Wm. A. White, in his book above referred to (Outline of
Psychiatry), says:
* * * Mental processes, from their incidence in sensations to the release
of the motor responses constituting conduct, are conceived to have as their phy-
sical substratum a continuous neural process. The process, although differently
named in different parts of its course for convenience of designation, is a con-
tinuous one. * * * The standpoint of this new-psychology is distinctly differ-
ent from the standpoint of a few years ago. Until its development the attitude
of the psychiatrist was that of the systematic biologist classifying the several
cases into families, genera, species, but classifying upon the basis of the obvious
symptoms only. The keynote of the new standpoint is its distinctly individual-
istic trend. * * * The so-called clinical types are not clean-cut entities, but
are only groups of symptoms, which either seem to occur more frequently in
combination or else have been more definitely and clearly seen because of that
combination. In fact types as such may be said to be in the minority. The great
mass of cases seen are combinations more or less intermediate in character. The
conception of types in order to be accurate must be from a broadly biological
viewpoint. Types are like species. They have innumerable transition and inter-
mediate forms. * * * Insanity, therefore, is not a disease; it is rather a
class of disorders, which tend to arrange themselves with greater or less dis-
tinctiveness into groups of reaction types.
In relation to practical eugenics a specific psychosis may be directly
inherited as such, in which case the disease will appear in due onto-
genetic sequence. Or its diathesis only may be transmitted. In some
types, such as chronic alcoholism and paresis, heredity appears to be
the foundation factor, but the poisons respectively of alcohol and of
treponema pallidum must conspire with this defective background in
order to produce the disease. So in the group of so-called functional
psychoses there may be either a weak or strong diathesis—the one
requiring a relatively great stress and the other a relatively little stress
to bring on the ailment. To the extent that a given strain possesses a
hereditary constitutional make-up liable to display a psychosis under
anything less than an extraordinary formidable stress of circumstances,
there exists in such strain a cacogenic variety of the human race.
As in the case of the feeble-minded and criminalistic, the person-
ality of the individual is subject to great variation. It appears that
practically every normal function is susceptible of disorder and the