New-York tribune., 1870-11-15
INVITING DE5TH.

We have pointed out from time to time
lately the cause of half the vice among US;
the utter ignorance in parents of the facts
that certain nervous and cerebral diseases
transmitted from themselves tend to make of
their children from their birth criminals or
drunkards, and that only incessant and skillful
care can avert the danger. man drinks
moderately but steadily all of his life with no
apparent harm to himself; but his daughters
become nervous wrecks his sons epAeptics
libertines or incurable drunkards the hercdi-
tary tendency to crime having its pathology
and UNMARRIED laws precisely as scrofula, con-
sumption, or any other purely physical disease.
These are stale truths with medical men but
the majority of parents even those of aver
age intelligence and culture, are apparently
either ignorant or wickedly regardless of them.
When our people are brought to treat drunk
enness as a disease of the stomach and
blood, as well as of the soul, to meet it with
common sense and a physician as well az with
threats of eternal damnation and to remove
gn-shOps and gin-sellers for the same reasons
that they would stagnant ponds or uncleaned
sewers, there will be chance of rdding our
jails and almshOuses of half their tenants.
We have urged this point until it has grown
hackneyed and tedious; but how can we be
silent so long as a fresh murder or suicide
every day exempifes the ghastly peril and It's
ca,lse7
Another equally fatal mistake in the train
ing of American children is the system of
examining, hothouse forcing of their brains,
induced partly by the unhealthy, feverish am
btion and struggle that mark every phase of
our society, and partly by the short time al
lowed for education. The simplest physical
laws which any tyro in medical science could
give, that regulate the use and abuse of the
brain, are utterly disregarded by educated
parents. Phil's and Toms stomachs and backs
and legs are subjected to all kinds of hygienic
treatment, while the poor, spOngy tenants that
rule them all are neglected, oyerworked and
disabled for life. To crafty mothers silly
vanity during a boys school-days, many
man is made incompetent and useless. If the
boy shows any sign of unnatural ambition or
power, instead of regarding it as a symptom
of an unhealthy condition of the blood ves-
sells or other cerebral disease, and treating it
accordingly it is accepted an evidence of
genius, and the inhamed brain is taxed to the
uttermost, until it gives way exhausted
The proof which was given last week of the
results of this fatal error is one so pathetic
that we would not touch on it were it not
already familiar to our readers, and if we did
not think it wrong that the lesson of the
beautiful and promising life so prematurely
sacrificed should be left unread. Here was
boy, inheriting refined tastes and high nervous
sensibilities, reared in scholarly atmosphere,
the whole tendency of whose everyday life
was to excite his brain to unnatural activity.
Beside this, the conformation of his head and
his childish habits gave hints of an abnormal
action of the brain. "Oil paintings of merit
" at the age of H." popular essays on self
government and public schools" were indi-
cations of cerebral disease, preci ely as a
scarlet rash would be of measles, and should
have been received with alarm instead of
qualification. A boy of 10, who dovOtes HIM
self TO metaphysical study. Plato. and Conitc. |