The poisoned brain: Tracing the history of biological decay and social injustice

“ For example, color is in the truest sense only skin deep, and is a racial adaptation to climate. Stature, the shape of the nose, etc., do not in themselves involve specific mental characteristics. But great differences in the brain and the rest of the nervous system, and in certain other of the viscera, would necessarily involve important mental differences and therefore variation in the capacity for culture. ”

“ Slaves and degenerates at home bred her future citizens.
"Have we also placed our feet on the path of oblivion? History is littered with the wrecks of civilization. And always the secret is found in racial degeneracy—the lowering of the standard of racial values. Civilization is a name—an effect. Race is the cause. If a race maintains its soul, it must remain itself and it must breed its best. Race is the result of thousands of years of this selection. One drop of negro blood makes a negro. The inferior can always blot out the superior if granted equality. ”

“ Amid increasing political polarization, hate politics evolved into a national plague, and the Capitol was stormed in post-election riots.
-- Ethnic minority groups suffered systematic racial discrimination and were in a difficult situation. People of color made up about one-third of all minors under the age of 18 in the United States but two-thirds of all of the country’s imprisoned minors. African Americans are three times as likely as whites to be infected with the coronavirus, twice as likely to die from COVID-19, and three times as likely to be killed by the police. ”

“ African Americans represent 13 percent of the general population, but more than 40 percent of the homeless population is African Americans, the National Alliance to End Homelessness reported (endhomelessness.org, June 6. 2018) .
Racial discrimination causes health disparities. When looking at the 10 leading causes of death in the United States, including cancer, stroke and heart disease, mortality rates among black Americans were higher than among white Americans. ”

“ In the course of epilepsy there arises gradually a typical degeneration of the brain. The degeneration is, however, only discoverable in severe cases and when the disease has existed for some time. If the attacks have only existed for a relatively short time, not more than a few years, the brain as a rule shows nothing. Seventeen per cent, of our patients suffer from progressive paralysis and senile dementia. Both diseases present characteristic changes in the brain. In paralysis there is most extensive shrinkage of the brain, so that the cortex is often reduced by one half. ”

“ There may be neurological symptoms caused by the arteriosclerotic complications, such as headache, pupillary changes, tremors of the tongue and disturbance of the reflexes. Tremors are also shown in the writing. Paraphasia occurs and there may be sensory aphasia or apraxia.
In severe cases of senile dementia Kraepelin expects to find definite lesions at autopsy. The brain weight is always decreased, sometimes to a very striking degree. The volume of the brain is reduced and the ventricles enlarged. The cortex is diminished in thickness, the frontal region being most affected. ”

“ That which is the nervous material proper, microscopic examination shows us to be diminished everywhere in the old bee and in the old man, and the tissue which supports it, which is of a coarser nature and can not perform any of the nobler functions, fills up all the space thus left, so that the actual composition of the brain is by this means changed. ”

“ It is earnestly to be hoped that the medical profession will speedily take up this question of the racial poisons. Already the profession is beginning to become the great instrument of individual hygiene: and every year will enhance the importance of this work, as compared with the cure of disease. Now negative eugenics is substantially racial hygiene: and the next great epoch in the evolution of medicine and the medical profession will be the enrolment of its knowledge and influence in the cause of racial hygiene. ”

“ Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding stream of grain. ”

“ Also our glorious manhood and womanhood; immoral, corrupt, tottering, down-trodden and debauched by a superior race, we have perished in that winter night of the transition period. At a single blow our laws were torn asunder; loathsome diseases we had never known crushed out the life and beauty of our physical bodies, and demented our spiritual minds with lowly passions. Poisonous spiritous drink has set the brain on fire, degrading man and womanhood, thus as a race we have perished. ”

“ The amount of crime among immigrants in the United States is partly due to their age and sex distribution, partly due to their concentration in cities, partly to the bad environment from which they have sometimes come; partly to inherent racial characteristics, such as make crimes of violence frequent among the Southern Italians, crimes of gain proportionately more frequent among the Jews, and violence when drunk more a characteristic of the Slavs. No restriction of immigration can wholly eliminate the criminal tendencies, but, says Dr. ”

“ When we thus find the same institutions and the same mental traits characterising, from the dawn of history to the present time, all the widely separated branches of one racial stock and of this stock alone, we realize how powerful over the destiny of nations is the influence of racial character formed in the long prehistoric ages; we see how futile it is to attempt to explain the mental traits of a people by the history of their political institutions during a few recent centuries ”

“ The lack of brain-discipline, ignorance, too many hours of toil, too few of relaxation, illy-prepared or unsuitable food, foul air in sleeping apartments, unsanitary surroundings, and other conditions always attendant upon the poor, especially in large towns and cities, all tend toward deterioration of brain-tissue. ”

“ It has been proved over and over again by everyday experience that mental and emotional conditions positively affect the chemical composition of the tissues and secretions of the body. The destructive emotions of fear, worry, anger, jealousy, revengefulness, envy, etc., actually poison the fluids and tissues of the body. The bite of an angry man may cause blood-poisoning and prove as fatal as the bite of a mad dog. ”

“ Again she experienced that disintegration of will which once had left her at the mercy of that instinct for destruction which is one of the essential particles of the ego.
Her brain was almost torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not care. But if her brain was sodden, her nerves felt as if on the verge of explosion. ”

“ Every study of the psychosis of regression and age must start from this fact and we must seek to distinguish the forms of weakness of old age due to central tissues from those that have their cause in the primary weakness of the blood vessels. For sclerotic senile dementia anatomy has already more or less basis. For the various forms of brain sclerosis it is now possible to propose an anatomical diagnosis, although it is impossible to have a very definite clinical picture of what takes place. ”

“ The weakness of the brain evinces itself in impairment of memory; in slowness of apprehension; in inability to fix the thoughts long on one thing; and the tendency, therefore, to wander from one subject to another, and to travel to and fro, which may pass on to want of control, or imbecility, or even to dementia, This last, saddest state of all, was witnessed only in two of our centenarians. Indeed, the brain in many held out as well as or better than other organs—which may be regarded one of the bright rays, if not the brightest, in the centenarian landscape. ”

“ Here, in cold scientific statement, is our social problem: here are volumes biological on heredity, eugenics, dietetics, and disease; volumes sociological on marriage, prostitution, the family, the position of woman, contraception and the control of population; volumes psychological on education, criminology, and the replacement of supernatural by social religion; volumes economic on private property, poverty, child labor, industrial methods, arbitration, minimum wage, trusts, free trade, immigration, prohibition, war ”

“ Sullivan points out that the racial effects of alcoholism in man are similar to those obtained by experimental intoxication in the lower animals. Combemale, for instance, found that pups begotten of a healthy bitch by an alcoholised dog were congenitally feeble and showed a marked degree of asymmetry of the brain. ”

“ It sees that the most responsible and most intelligent members of society are the less fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile. Herein lies the unbalance, the great biological menace to the future of civilization. Are we heading to biological destruction, toward the gradual but certain attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial health by the sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility? This is not such a remote danger as the optimistic Eugenist might suppose. The mating of the moron with a person of sound stock may, as Dr. ”

“ The Undershafts cannot make conviction and courage; yet both are indispensable if one is to see that, in the words of Undershaft:
"Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification: they justify themselves. There are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed [Pg 203] people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. ”

“ The insecure possession, the endless division and alienation of property, an anxious dread of loss, and a rapacious love of gain, have become universal. Care for the means of daily existence, like creeping poison, unnerves the population. ”

“ Racial discrimination is widespread. Racial inferiority and superiority complexes are deeply embedded in U.S. systems and have become "inextricable." Interviews with more than 3,000 African Americans showed that 82 percent of them considered racism a major problem for African descendants in the United States, while 79 percent reported having experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity, and 68 percent said racial discrimination is the main reason why many Black people can't get ahead, CNN reported on Aug. ”

“ The social discords that spring up among a people like those that so often divide the families of degenerates, taken together, constitute a manifestation of the dissolution of heredity; their source is in a biological fact.
The facts that authorize us to regard morbid heredity or degeneration in general as the consequence of disorders of nutrition during the developmental period of evolution permit us to comprehend the exceptions to the laws of heredity, and consequently to conceive the possibility of securing means of favoring these exceptions and of contending against degeneration. ”

“ School strain, therefore, produces, like all the acquired factors of degeneracy, a systemic nervous exhaustion which may be expressed either in general neuropathy or hysteria after puberty, or in the tropho-neuroses, like gout and allied states, or in epilepsy or arterial change, predisposing to rupture of arteries at periods of stress, with resultant convulsions and paralysis. ”

“ From the nature of the case the infusions of white blood that have come in many instances to the black race in this country are not the best that race afforded. 239And if anything further is needed to account for racial irregularities—the warping and shrinking, the knotting and cracking of the sturdy old timber, the two hundred and fifty years of training here are quite sufficient to explain all. I have often thought, since coming in closer contact with the Puritan element in America, what a different planing and shaping this timber might have received under their hands! ”

“ By squeezing human beings in the grip of an inelastic system and forcibly holding them fixed, we have ignored the laws of life and growth. We have forced living souls into a permanent passivity, making them incapable of moulding circumstance to their own intrinsic design, and of mastering their own destiny. Borrowing our ideal of life from a dark period of our degeneracy, we have covered up our sensitiveness of soul under the immovable weight of a remote past. ”

“ The excitement of fear in the mind still more accelerates heart action and respiration, intensifies the local congestion and greatly increases the morbid accumulations in the system. In the last chapters of this volume we shall deal especially with the deteriorating influence of fear, anxiety, anger, irritability, impatience, etc., and explain how these and all other destructive emotions actually poison the secretions of the body. ”

“ When we have constructed a true psychological pathology, we shall understand clearly why and how it is that fear can turn the hair gray in a single night; that a mother's milk can be poisoned by a moment of terror; that the heart may be paralyzed by a sudden joy or sorrow; that dyspepsia, paralysis, and many other diseases are produced by mental worry and fret and the brain-fag of overwork and anxiety. ”

“ Nobody can fully explain his own moods, and tell why one hour of his own life is tinged with a mystic glory and the next wrapped in darkness; and still less can we unravel all the symptoms of widespread social disquiet. The race, like the individual, has strange presentiments of coming good or evil, which help perhaps to fulfil themselves. ”

“ Those forms of mental activity which are developed late in the history of the race, and late in the life of the child, that tense and strenuous activity upon which modern progress depends, the power to hold ourselves by sustained attention and sustained effort down to hard and uninteresting tasks for the sake of some ultimate end, the concentration of the mental forces upon problems of science, philosophy and invention, and the inhibition of old and undesirable responses—all these bring quick and extreme fatigue and demand rest for the corresponding parts or centers of the brain. ”

“ We thus trace the desire for alcohol to the inherent need of mind and body for relaxation, a need normally supplied by all the varied forms of play and sport. Physiologically it is expressed by the need of rest felt by the higher brain centers upon which conditions of civilization bring so severe a strain. Psychologically it is the expression of the desire for release from the tension of the strenuous life. ”

“ He claims that the demands of modern civilization place men under too great a strain, that the human race is tending toward insanity, and that by and by we shall stop our daily newspapers, remove the telephones from our homes, and return to a life of greater simplicity. It is true that tension never relaxed loses its spring, and worry kills, but the most potent causes of degeneration are false pleasures and lack of healthful work. Evolution’s most important ethical maxim is that deadheads in society degenerate as do parasites in the lower animal kingdom. ”

“ Excessive action of the brain whereby the faculties become exhausted, a want of proper action whereby the functions become impaired and diminished, the visions, delusions, and mania which accompany irritability, or the weakness which results from an excess of vital functions, indigestion and sleeplessness, are all the result of a disturbance of the physical system. ”

“ He paused a moment, but Dartmouth made no reply, and he went on.
"Any man who yields habitually to melancholia may expect his brain, sooner or later, to degenerate from its original strength, and relax the toughness and compactness of its fibre. Absolute dementia may not be the result for some years, but there will be occasional and painful indications of the end for a long space before it arrives. The indications, as a rule, will assume the form of visions and dreams and wild imaginings of various sorts. ”

“ Not only degenerates, but even we normal beings, in the conflict of social life, and because of our congenital weaknesses, have felt that we were losing, or that we were failing to acquire the rich possibilities latent in our consciousness, and that vainly formed the height of our ambition. And when this occurred, the body also lost something of the beauty which it might have attained, or rather, it lacked the power to develop it. In the words of Rousseau, "Our intellectual gifts, our vices, our virtues, and consequently our characters, are all dependent upon our organism." ”

“ In short, the wily old Jew had the boy in his toils. Having prepared his mind, by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to the companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place, he was now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it, and change its hue for ever. ”

“ You have been brought up on clumsy falsehoods and your darkened mind feeds on the works of darkness. You deceive and are deceived with delightful thoroughness, and you, too, have your racial hatreds, your cruel prejudices and your contempt for the unfortunate. ”