ID# 678:
"The South's fight for race purity," by R.W. Wooley, Pearson's Magazine
Date:
Circa 1910
Pages: (1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8)
Source:
American Philosophical Society, ERO, MSC77,SerI,Box 38, A:3174

&quote;The South's fight for race purity,&quote; by R.W. Wooley, Pearson's Magazine

208 Pearson's Magazine man. It is idle and wrong to speak of it and of its companion in destruction, the blood malady, as Nature's pruning knife. They are the death head at the feast where Future's health is drunk. In a comparatively recent address, delivered in Boston, Dr. Morrow said that to the debit side of this blood disease should be placed 90 per cent of locomotor ataxia, more than 75 per cent of ocular paralyses, a large but indeterminate proportion of general paralysis, paraplegia and hemiplegia, and 85 per cent of all cases of paresis - all affectious of a serious and, for the most part, incurable. He declared that its bill of heredity and mortality is appalling; that it causes 42 per cent of all miscarriages; that 60 per cent to 80 per cent of all children afflicted with it die before being born or shortly after birth, and that those who finally survive "are the subjects of degeneration and organic defects which are susceptible of transmission to the third generation." Of gonorrhea, which virulent poison characterizes - caused by the coccus of Neisser - he said it was even a greater depopulating factor. To it, he stated, gynecologists charge "80 per cent of all deaths from inflammatory diseases particular to women, more than 75 per cent of the suupurative pelvic inflammations and 50 per cent of all gynecological operations performed by surgeons, to say nothing of the large number of women who are permanently invalided." He said further that from 10 per cent to 30 per cent of all blindness is caused by it and that 50 per cent of all women infected with it are rendered permanently sterile. Other Startling Results Dr. J Tabor Johnson made rather startling statements concerning this disease in an interesting paper read before the Medical Society of the District of Columbia in November, 1907. In part, he said: "Sociologists and those interested in the preservation and perpetuation of American families in our country have become alarmed over the constantly diminishing size of the American family. Legislatures in some of our States have appointed exert committees to investigate and report. Statisticians, both State and national, acknowledge that 'race suicide,' as the President of the United States has so aptly called it, is not only alarmingly frequent, but is on the increase. Dr. Engleman, of Boston, stated in a public address in this city five years ago that the birth-rate of the American-born population was lower than that of any European country except France, and that the fecundity of American women was less than that of any other country." Note carefully that Dr. Johnson dwells upon the word "American." In the Southern States the proportion of European-born population or of European-born women is still so small as to be hardly worthy of serious attention. The vast majority of whites there are Anglo-Saxons descended from the Cavaliers and Britons of humbler stock who came to this country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Imagine what it means if the birth-rate among them is really becoming smaller than in France, where, it is constantly being charged, more people are going out of this world than are coming into it. "Dr. Ward, of New York, has insisted within the year," said Dr. Johnson, "that the number of children per marriage has decreased from 4.5 in the eighteenth century to 2.5 at the present time, and that while voluntary 'race suicide' is alarmingly prevalent there is still the great multitude who, through no wish of their own, are childless and who are constantly spending their time and money in seeking relief." 75 Per Cent of Men Affected This "great multitude" are victims of the coccus of Neisser. Dr. Johnson stated that one may safely say it is the most frequent of all the adult diseases. "The lowest estimate which we meet in recent literature," he says, "is that at least 75 per cent of the male inhabitants of our cities, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, have had, or now have, this disease. Its frequency is place by many at a much higher rate, varying anywhere from seventy-five to ninety-five per cent. It is probable that the latter figure is more nearly correct than the former." Dr. D. R. Hooker, chairman of the Committee on Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, says the actual extent of the so-called social diseases is but vaguely known even by the members of the medical profession because of the lack of any available means of obtaining statistics about them. In a recently published report giving the results of investigations made by his committee, he states that in Johns Hopkins Hospital the

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