galton.org 45
Criminals and the Insane
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diminishing; the infant mortality has of late been horrible, but fortunately
the women of the present generation bear usually but few children, and
many of them are altogether childless.
The criminal classes contain a considerable portion of epileptics and
other persons of instable, emotional temperament, subject to nervous
explosions that burst out at intervals and relieve the system. The mad
outbreaks of women in convict prisons is a most curious phenomenon.
Some of them are apt from time to time to have a gradually increasing
desire that at last becomes irresistible, to “break out,” as it is technically
called; that is, to smash and tear everything they can within reach, and to
shriek, curse, and bowl. At length the fit expends itself; the devil, as it
were, leaves them, and they begin to behave again in their ordinary way.
The highest form of emotional instability exists in confirmed epilepsy,
where its manifestations have often been studied; it is found in a high but
somewhat less extraordinary degree in the hysterical and allied affections.
In the confirmed epileptic constitution the signs of general instability of
nervous action are muscular convulsions, irregularities of bodily
temperature, mobile intellectual activity, and extraordinary oscillations
between opposed emotional states. I am assured by excellent authority
that instable manifestations of extreme piety and of extreme vice are
almost invariably shown by epileptics, and should be regarded as a
prominent feature of their peculiar constitution. These unfortunate beings
see no incongruity between the pious phrases that they pour out at one
moment and their vile and obscene language in the next; neither do they
show repentance for past misconduct when they are convicted of crimes,
however abominable these may be. They are creatures of the moment,
possessing no inhibitory check upon their desires and emotions, which
drive them headlong hither and thither.
Madness is often associated with epilepsy; in all cases it is a frightful
and hereditary disfigurement of humanity, which appears, from the upshot
of various conflicting accounts, to be on the increase. The neurotic
constitution
