Note 595 — Chapter VI

In the first place the poor classes are badly and insufficiently fed, and as a consequence grow weak, and the children born to them are inferior physically and mentally. The insufficient nourishment of the mother during her pregnancy, and the insufficient nourishment of the child during the first years of his life, are especially fatal to him. Then those who are badly fed are predisposed to tuberculosis, scrofula, and rickets, which, in their turn, may be the causes of degeneracy.595 Rickety women often have a contraction of the pelvis, which hinders child-birth, and may cause a lesion to the infant’s brain. Note, for example, the opinion of Dr. Näcke, who says: “The social misery, bad hygiene and food … often enough beget a miserable generation and must already have injured the germ. The same causes, however, on the other hand easily produce feeble women with qualitatively and quantitatively insufficient milk, and most of all with a narrow pelvis, through which births take place with difficulty and to the detriment of the brain of the child. If now the above named factors come in later to affect the child, the derangement of nutrition will be further increased, and it is no wonder if all kinds of rickety and scrofulous symptoms appear in the body, and all kinds of children’s ailments injure both body and mind.”596