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V. ON IDIOCY.

By P. MARTIN DUNCAN, M.B. Lond., F.R.S., &c.

WHAT became of the idiots in the days of antiquity? Were there any amongst the early races of mankind? How is it that they are hardly mentioned by classical authors, and not noticed at all in Holy Writ? These are questions upon which those who are aware of the multitudes of idiots in the most highly civilized modern communities may speculate freely, but not very satisfactorily. The term idiot is of course Aristotelian. The existence of peculiar members of the human family who were "solitary" was known to the founder of that philosophy, and he clearly recognized the absence of the vie de relation amongst those he so well and aptly termed "os" in kind. Children and adults who could not be communicated with, and who could not place themselves en rapport with others, were considered to be "solitaries;" they were beyond the sympathies, and were heedless of the love of the human race, and they were incapable of expressing the desire for or of seeking companionship. Probably Grecian idiots were very much akin to those of modern date in their deficiencies and peculiarities. They stared open-eyed by the hour, or they waved their hands about, beslavered their bodies, and wearied the beholder with automatic movements. They were as heedless of the weather as of the voice of authority, and they had neither reverence for the priest nor admiration for the goddesses or their living representatives. Alone amongst the multitudes, thoughtless amongst the philosophers, unloving when embraced, caring for no one, having neither friends nor foes, the "solitaries" of old were not unsurrounded by a faint atmosphere of sanctity even amongst the Greeks. They were unlike all other children when young, and could not be associated with in mental communion when old. They had no greed of gold; food they did not live for; luxury they were careless about; and of ambition they had none. The Helot might look upon the heedless solitary with slight respect, and call him a fool like a practical Anglo-Saxon; but his philosophic master, with his yearnings after the abstract and unknown, and with his dim misgivings concerning his own origin and future state, evidently associated the condition of his fellow-mortal with a mysterious and personal relation to the gods. He gilded the gingerbread humanity with a halo of sanctity, but the slave doomed to work did nothing of the sort. The men who recognized something more than a fiction in the myth of Prometheus gazed into the fixed eyes of the "solitaries" and speculated upon the possibility of the existence of an inward life of thonght behind those dull orbs, and of a close affinity with the hidden intelligence of Zeus. Was there an Elysium within and a Tartarus

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clouding the without? Was there a curse which still could not extinguish the celestial fire? Bound with iron on the rock, torn by the everlasting bird, ever living, never dying. Thus with the type of organic life, was it thus in degree with the living example of a mindless body? There was no aberration evident to the thinkers of old in the "dos;" he was not chased by the Furies, but he was bound with invisible chains. Psyche was hidden, but the Satyr was free. The priesthood could but recognize some of the psychical conditions of the solitary in the exhausted and mentally collapsed state of the oracular virgins after prolonged religious excitement, and after the influence of the ritualistic therapeutics of the day had ceased to stimulate. These thoughts were probably common enough in a land where nature was luxuriant and where incessant toil was not requisite for existence. Farther to the east, where the struggle for life has never been great, there has been no hesitation in asserting that the idiot and the insane are under the especial care of the Deity; and amongst the followers of Mahomet the first of these has ever been looked upon with awe from the apparently willing self-exposure to the noonday sun, to the bitterest cold, and from the total disregard of consequences.

There is nothing in the cuneiform writing of the Babylonians nor in the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians to denote the existence of idiots during the time when those empires flourished; and it is very remarkable that there should not have been any notice of the idiotic state mentioned in the Book of Leviticus in the catalogue of those physical defects which were to prevent the priest from taking an active part in the ceremonial of the Tabernacle.

If misery, social degradation, and the free indulgence of the animal passions involve idiocy, there ought to have been plenty of it during the whole of the Roman Republic and Empire wherever the eagles rested. But there is much silence on the subject throughout the Latin authors. There were idiots in those days, and the practical Roman looked upon them as useless entities. They had no sanctity in his eyes, and hence their probable rarity. Doubtless the unfortunate children were neglected, and there is much reason for believing that they were "exposed." A congenital idiot soon begins to give trouble and to excite unusual attention; moreover, unless extra care is given to it, death is sure to ensue in early childhood. There are some very curious passages in the Latin classics that refer to the burial without cremation of very young children, and it is evident that although the laws against intramural sepulture were very stringent, there were instances where it took place surreptitiously. There is some reason for believing that many of the babies whose skeletons are now and then found close to Roman villas in this country and on the Continent had been buried there before teething had commenced, and that they

had died from a peculiar incapacity for receiving nourishment in the usual way. This defect is common enough in profound idiots. Under the most favourable circumstances the Roman infant had a sharp struggle for existence, and the amount of the mortality of the young may be estimated, if we leave the question of idiocy out, by the number of skeletons discovered in the "suggrundaria "under the eaves and close to the walls of houses. At Chesterford * no less than fifteen skeletons of infants were found close to the walls of a Roman villa discovered in 1852. The bodies were associated with a corresponding number of small vessels of Roman manufacture. It would seem that their parents had done all in their power by providing them with nourishment to soothe them and stop the crying, which Virgil, in the narrative of the descent of Æneas to Hades, in the 6th book of the Æneid, mentions thus:

"Vagitus et ingens,

Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo."

The shades of the children were crying, and on the first threshold, that is just without the doors-an allusion no doubt to the place of their sepulture. The laws against intramural burial extended to the case of children who were subject to be buried in the cemeteries but not to be burned. Pliny tells us that children cut their teeth in the seventh month!!! and proceeds to inform us that it was not customary to burn their bodies before that time. Juvenal also describes the funeral of a child without fire—

"Terra clauditur infans, et minor igne rogi."

Fulgentius says that baby bodies were not burned until they were forty days old. There is, then, some reason for believing that the interment laws were broken in the case of such children as were idiotic and still-born. These were buried quietly in the "suggrundaria."

Those idiots whom we call simpletons, and who are not really solitaries, but approach the lowest types of the perfect in mind, were doubtless common in those Roman families where there was wealth and freedom from the usual active competition with the world. Doubtless there was many a big Roman, solemn and staidlooking, who was studiously silent and dressed in the quietest toga, just as there are magnificent-looking men, but, oh, how simple, who now-a-days follow the wise precept of holding the tongue and wearing black. The range of mental deficiency, from the true solitary through those who are mimics and mischievous incapables, to the solemn and sometimes witty fool who just verges on the

* An admirable description of this discovery, from which I have quoted largely, is in the Trans. Essex Arch. Soc., 1858, by the late Lord Braybrooke.

most stupid of perfect mankind, was not noticed by the Roman alienist physicians.

There are no notices of idiots in the time of Arabian learning, when Europe was linked on to civilization by its clergy; and the affliction is never seen, so it is said, amongst the pure Arabs of the present day, who continue generation after generation to marry their uncles' daughters as a matter of course. This intermarriage occurs in many nations, living in what we call a very absurdly savage state, and yet idiots are either rare or absent amongst them.

The history of idiocy is then to be written in a very small space, yet the condition is one of the greatest curses of modern times.

There are at least 10,000 pauper idiots in England and Wales, and there are 1760 idiots confined in workhouses and lunatic asylums in Ireland, but how many there are out of doors is unknown. In France there are 2 5 idiots born in every 1000 births. There are no statistics that can decide how many idiots there are in private families in Great Britain, but every alienist physician knows their number is legion. They are kept out of the way, shut up, being looked upon as a disgrace to the family, for people do not discriminate between the causes that give idiots to the drunken and reprobate, and those that induce idiocy in the families of the purest in mind and who lead the gentlest of lives. There is no greater trial in a family than the presence of an idiot child, for it not only attracts too much maternal care, but it affords, as it grows, a bad example to the other children. Supposing that there are two idiots born for every thousand of healthy children, what a mass of hidden suffering there must be around us for which there is hardly any relief.

The percentage of idiots increased in Ireland as the general population diminished after the famine and during the subsequent emigration; it is very large in France, whose population is at a standstill; it is great in North America, where the population is most mixed; and it is greater in those English counties where there is an agricultural population, earning poor wages and looking to the Union as their haven of rest, than in the others. In Herefordshire there were, a year or two since, 111 idiots (pauper) in 106,796 inhabitants, or 1 in 962; in Wiltshire, 237 pauper idiots in 236,027 inhabitants, or 1 in 995; in Berkshire, 200 pauper idiots in 205,625 inhabiants, or 1 in 1028; and in North Wales, there is a pauper idiot for every 906 souls. With these figures before us it is of no use hiding our national skeleton; the closet-door is opened every year during the census of pauperdom, and the grim fact constantly increases. Possessing what we call the highest civilization, we European and North American nations produce more useless children than those savages who have little or no civilization.

We present, as peoples, indications of defective vital force, which are not witnessed amongst those human beings that live in a state of nature. There must then be something rotten in some parts of our boasted civilization; and not only a something which has to do with our psychology, but a great deal more with our power of physical persistence. It is a fact that the type of the perfect minded just above the highest idiots or the simpletons is more distinguishable amongst the most civilized of the civilized, than amongst those who are the so-called children of nature. Dolts, boobies, and stupids, et hoc genus omne, abound in young Saxondom, but their representatives are rare amongst the tribes that are slowly disappearing before the white man. We notice a wild flower, and observe that it flourishes in the woods, on the hill side, and down in the valley; its growth is magnificent and the reproduction is invariable. We transplant the flower into our gardens and care for it, and year after year its beauties remain in perfection; but if, in order to improve upon nature and to attempt to excite some hidden powers of growth, the plant is removed to the greenhouse and "cultivated," one system of vital phenomena invariably extends to the detriment of another. The vegetative and the reproductive systems are constantly antagonistic under the artificial treatment. You select splendid flowerers and strain every function to perpetuate the unusual inflorescence; but what occurs in the majority of cases? The outside is splendid, but everything else is sacrificed. You have outraged nature and have obtained the homologue of an idiot in a highly civilized community. It is the same with animals, and there is not much difficulty in "cultivating" any of our domestic pets until the progeny becomes stupid and very difficult to keep alive. Nature only cares for those organisms that possess all their functions in perfection, and the struggle for existence soon militates against those whose nutrition is defective or hard to influence. It is clear that there are some vices and defects in our civilization that are positively antagonistic to the production of a population perfect in mind and body, and negatively so also by evolving evil out of what is hardly otherwise than normal in so-called savage nations. The marriage of close relations, over-indulgence in food and spirituous liquors, continuous misery and moral degradation, hopeless poverty, over-work, agricultural drudgery, everlasting hebetude from the general sameness of surroundings, are amongst the proximate causes of congenital idiocy, and of that kind which develops itself in healthy children some time after birth, and which has similar phenomena.

The production of insanity and the development of idiocy are two different things, and it is one of the signs of the times that idiots are being separated from lunatics. The public mind still associates the two conditions, and the public purse is certainly well

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