JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Among the many unexpected sentences that Prof. J.A. Lindsay1 (1856-1931) writes in his article “The Eugenic and Social Influence of the War” (in The Eugenics Review, volume X, No. 3, October 1918) are the following:
“A very unexpected feature of war-time has been the decline of insanity.”
And
“… that war, fruitful though it is in shock cases and neurasthenia, does not increase, but may even tend to diminish, insanity.”
I’ve included the two long paragraphs in which they occur, below, and also provide a link for the full article.
Of course this makes no sense as it stands, but there it is.
Dr. Lindsay’s article is followed straight away by Charles Darwin’s son, Major Leonard Darwin, who wonders about the eugenic survivability of the war in his “The Need for Widespread Eugenic Reform During Reconstruction”.
Eugenics as a way of life was in its heyday at this point, though its demise was approaching, and its ideas (for far as establishing it as a field of intellectual study) discredited in the next decade or so, even though the journal The Eugenics Review would survive into 1962.
Here are the quotes (bold mine):