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

THE SCOPE OF THE COMMITTEE’S WORK. 45
by extrinsic agencies rather than by innate heredity. Thus, with the
blind, a large percentage—from 20 per cent. to 40 per cent.—are
known to have lost their sight by the easily preventable ophthalmia
neonatorum. Many individual persons legally counted insane are so,
not because of heredity, but because of some extraordinary harsh-
ness of circumstance. It is known beyond dispute that many cases
of mental defects and physical deformities are caused almost entirely
by disease or injury to persons of sound constitution. Such cases
should be charged largely to the fault of environment and not to that
of heredity. There is much personal and social salvage in them, and
a solicitous social order can well afford to lend them personal aid
and to help them rear their families. Such individuals, although
both personally and socially inadequate, are, because of the persist-
ency of ancestral germ-plasm and the falsity of the doctrine of the
transmission of acquired traits, not cacogenic, and for the purposes
of this study are not, therefore, to be considered as proper subjects
for eugenical segregation, much less for sterilization. Eugenics con-
cerns only innate qualities. It is therefore the task, riot of eugenics,
but of education, preventive medicine, mental hygiene, sex hygiene,
movements for the conservation of vision, for the prevention of in-
dustrial accidents, and for similar agencies to protect the members of
society from socially inadequating forces, and for the medical and
philanthropic sciences to treat individuals who, in spite of these
preventative agencies, do fall the victim of crippling forces
CHAPTER III.
SUGGESTED REMEDIES.
In a study of this sort it is proper carefully to consider each of the
several different remedies which have been proposed or suggested or
which appear as possibly efficacious for purging from the blood of the
race the innately defective strains described in the previous chapter.
The following list is a catalog of such agencies.
1. Life segregation (or segregation during the reproductive
period).
2. Sterilization.
3. Restrictive marriage laws and customs.
4. Eugenical education of the public and of prospective marriage
mates.